22, 23, 24. Same as [19], [20] and [21], only standing position.
The beneficial effects are increased in the six last by inflating the lungs.
The severe caustic treatment that has been so universal in these affections is greatly to be deprecated. There are fashions in medicines as in other things, and the one fashion the last twenty-five years has been local treatment for diseases of women. In no department of medical practice has the physician’s prerogative been more abused. For the slightest ailments the severest applications are often employed. Nitrate of silver, sulphate of zinc, corrosive sublimate, tannic acid, nitric acid, all violent in their action, are in common use. Physicians are known to resort frequently to the application of a probe, heated to a white heat, and, what is just as bad, to wet a swab in fuming nitric acid, and introduce it into the womb. The delicate mucus membrane is burned and scarified, the patient tortured, and the nerves receive a severe shock. Patients able to be about are often laid up for several days by one of these treatments.
One day I met a lady upon the street who had been confined to the house for two years. I expressed pleasure at seeing her out. She told me that she could get out because her doctor was absent and her local treatment suspended. She said: “That always makes me sick in bed three or four days.”
“What! do you permit such treatment?”
“The doctor says I cannot get well without it.”
She, like many other poor suffering women, was persuaded that all this torture was necessary to her final recovery.
Physicians are known to keep women under treatment two or three years, yet frequently, instead of improvement, there is only a constant decline in health and strength.
The tide is now turning, and both physicians and patients begin to see that a great wrong has been done. So high an authority as Dr. Gaillard Thomas says: “Every one who has had experience in the treatment of these disorders must have been impressed with the wonderful improvement in cases which have long resisted local treatment, resulting from a sea voyage, a visit to a watering place, a course of sea bathing, or a few months spent in the country.”
Dr. George T. Elliott says:—“In cases of uterine diseases, the best success will be attained by securing for patients a life of muscular activity, so equalizing the circulation. And that thus the local treatment, now so much in vogue, might commonly be dispensed with.”