1. It immediately attracted and concentrated in the mouth all the scattered pains of every part of the body.
2. It checked a nausea and vomiting.
3. It gradually, when it was copious, reduced the pulse, and thereby prevented the necessity of further bleeding or purging.
I wish it were possible to render the use of this remedy universal in the treatment of malignant fevers. Dr. Chisholm, in his account of the Beullam fever, has done much to establish its safety and efficacy. It is a rare occurrence for a patient that has been sufficiently bled and purged, to die after a salivation takes place. The artificial disease excited by the mercury suspends or destroys disease in every part of the body. The occasional inconveniences which attend it are not to be named with its certain and universal advantages. During the whole of the season in which the yellow fever prevailed, I saw but two instances in which it probably loosened or destroyed the teeth. I am not certain that the mercury was the cause of the injury or loss of those teeth; for who has not seen malignant fevers terminate in ulcers, which have ended in the erosions of bony parts of the body?
It has been justly remarked, that there can be but one action at a time in the blood-vessels. This was frequently illustrated by the manner in which mercury acted upon the system in this fever. It seldom salivated until the fever intermitted or declined. I saw several cases in which the salivation came on during the intermission, and went off during its exacerbation; and many, in which there was no salivation until the morbid action had ceased altogether in the blood-vessels, by the solution of the fever. It is because the action of the vessels, in epilepsy and pulmonary consumption, surpasses the stimulus of the mercury, that it is so difficult to excite a salivation in both those diseases.
Let not the advocates for the healing powers of nature complain of a salivation as an unnatural remedy in fevers. Dr. Sydenham speaks in high terms of it, in the fever of 1670, 1671, and 1672, in which cases it occurred spontaneously, and says that it cured it when it was so malignant as to be accompanied by purple spots on the body[123].
Blisters, when applied at a proper time, did great service in this fever. This time was, when the fever was so much weakened by evacuations, that the artificial pain excited by the stimulus of the blisters destroyed, and, like a conductor, conveyed off all the natural pain of the body. It is from ignorance, or inattention to the proper stage of fevers in which blisters have been applied, that there have been so many disputes among physicians respecting their efficacy. When applied in a state of great arterial action, they do harm; when applied after that action has nearly ceased, they do little or no service. I have called the period in which blisters are useful the blistering point. In bilious fevers this point is generally circumscribed within eight and forty hours.
The effects of blisters were as follow:
1. They concentrated, like a salivation, all the scattered pains of the body, and thereby,