As an example of a still more irritating inhalant, I watched the case of a phthisical man who secured employment on the government disinfecting corps, in Chicago, in purifying the lung-plague-infected stables with chloride of lime solution, and who very soon began to improve, gaining weight and strength, his cough meanwhile subsiding.
Cervello’s use of formalina by inhalation though well spoken of by its inventor would seem too irritating on the delicate lungs, however good it is as an antiseptic.
Inhalants may be conjoined with the pneumatic cabinet.
Among agents used to moderate the cough may be named codeine, morphia, cherry laurel water, wild cherry bark, guaiacol, menthol, syrup of Tolu, or chloroform, or alcohol inhalation.
As an internal antiseptic, carbonate of creosote has often proved beneficial.
Mustard blisters on the skin covering the tubercle is claimed by Knopf to act beneficially by attracting the microbes from the delicate lungs to the more robust skin and connective tissue, where they can be better disposed of by the more abundant leucocytes.
He has also found excellent results in complex infections in animals from the use of Marmorek’s streptococcic serum in doses of 10cc., followed after the second dose by 5cc. every 24 hours. In other cases it failed of the effect (reduction to normal temperature) evidently indicating that the hyperthermia was maintained by other microbes than the streptococcus. The principle is good, and perhaps at some time in the future a bacteriological examination of the sputum may reveal the microbes present and suggest the sera for such complications.
The introduction of air into the peritoneum has long been known to exercise a retarding and curative action on abdominal tuberculosis. At the present writing my colleague, V. A. Moore, is experimenting by pumping air and oxygen into the peritoneum and pleuræ in cattle slightly affected, with encouraging results.
I should add that isolated superficial tubercles may often be excised to advantage, and the part dressed antiseptically.
It is only in exceptional cases, however, that one is warranted in preserving and running the danger of spreading the tubercle bacillus for the advantage that can be secured to individual animals from treatment.