SALIVATION.
There is often a greater or less degree of this symptom during the period of pregnancy. Probably all women experience, at this time, a more than ordinary flow of the salivary fluid. This sometimes becomes very excessive and troublesome to the patient, especially at night, when the sleep is disturbed by the frequent necessity of emptying the mouth. Dr. Dewees observes: “It is almost always accompanied with acidity of the stomach and constipation of the bowels; the fluid discharged from the mouth, for the most part, is perfectly colorless and transparent; at other times it is more tenacious and frothy, and the quantity poured out is sometimes incredibly profuse. It almost always has an unpleasant taste, though not attended with an offensive smell; it keeps the stomach in a constant state of irritation, and not unfrequently provokes vomiting, especially if the saliva be tenacious, and requires an effort to discharge it.” This author relates a case where salivation commenced at the second month of pregnancy, in which the patient discharged daily from one to three quarts of salivary fluid, and became so weakened thereby, that she was unable to sit up without immediately fainting.
The above description of salivation in pregnancy may be said to apply to patients who live according to the ordinary modes of society. I have, during nine years past, known many women who have passed through pregnancy, practicing at the same time daily bathing, water-drinking, exercising regularly in the open air, with plain diet, and in no instance have I known salivation to prove at all inconvenient or troublesome. I judge that this affection, if such we may call it, can only come on when the general health is at fault, or the dietetic and other hygienic habits bad. True, there is probably always more or less increase of the salivary secretions in pregnancy, but if good habits are daily persevered in, I think no one will be troubled at all in this matter.
I find in a late work on Females—Professor Meigs’s—the following remarks on this subject, which go to show, on good authority, the uselessness of drug-treatment in this affection:
“I am sorry to tell you (the Professor addressing himself to his class), that I know of no remedy at all to be depended upon for the management of these great salivations. They are the troublesome concomitants of the gestation, and they cease with the cessation of the gestation. They cannot be cured by alkalies or acids, by venesection or purgation, or by any therapeutical treatment with which I am acquainted. If it were just, always to attribute the salivation to a state of the stomach, then it would be reasonable to apply remedies with a view to correct a faulty state of that organ, in hopes of curing the salivation.”
All this goes to prove, that you who are troubled with this affection are to depend upon the rational means, air, exercise, diet, and water-treatment, and not upon drugs, to remedy it. Mark too, how, year by year, the superiority of these hygienic and curative influences is being recognized by medical men, and how the old methods of dosing the system are going into disrepute.