Certain injuries are attended with what is known as shock. Usually the degree of shock is proportionate to the extent of the injury, though not always so. Often seemingly trivial injuries produce a fatal shock. The symptoms are cold, clammy skin, face very pale and pinched, eyes widely dilated and staring, pulse rapid and irregular, little or no pain, even from severe injuries. The patient retains his mental faculties but loses the power to originate, answering when spoken to but usually volunteering no statements of his own.
The treatment consists in lowering the head and elevating the extremities. Wrap the patient in hot blankets and place hot water bottles about him, give brandy, or what is as good, hot water; inject 1/30 gr. strychnia every fifteen minutes for three doses.
The symptoms from loss of blood are very much the same as from shock and luckily respond to the same treatment. In addition, if there chances to be a fountain syringe in the camp, give rectal enemas of hot normal salt solution, which can be made by dissolving a teaspoonful of common salt in a quart of sterile water. In some way this solution seems to take the place of the blood lost. A hot application over the heart is also valuable, as are mustard drafts to the spine.
MEDICAL TREATMENT OF CAMP
DISEASES
CHAPTER III
MEDICAL TREATMENT OF CAMP DISEASES
In this day of compact pharmaceuticals one can carry a complete equipment of medicines in a vest pocket almost. The old day of ponderous powders and nauseating liquids has passed. The physician now who prescribes for his patients immense bottles of "shotgun" mixtures writes himself down a back number. This manner of administering drugs can be taken advantage of by the man who wishes to carry with him upon his outing a supply of remedies for the relief of such ailments as may befall him.
Oliver Wendell Holmes once said in delivering an address to the graduating medical class of Harvard, "Young men, you have been taught here at least twenty remedies for every disease; after you have practiced medicine twenty years you will have one remedy for twenty diseases."
The genial autocrat was nearly right. The longer one continues in the practice of medicine, the fewer remedies he learns to depend upon. An Irish medical friend of mine once put the thing in very apt form when he said, "If I had to practice medicine on an island where I could have only three remedies, I should choose castor oil, opium, and strychnia. I'd physic them with the castor oil, constipate them with the opium, and stimulate them with the strychnia."