“After a certain amount of good effect has been produced, great benefit will often result from the application of a blister to the nape of the neck.”
Now compare with the above practice of bleeding and dosing, secundum artem, the true and rational one.
In nineteen cases out of twenty, the nervous headache comes from either tea or coffee drinking, or the use of improper food. Only remove the causes, then, and the difficulty vanishes. Strange to say, however, there are many women who have either so little confidence in what any one can say to them, or so little control over themselves, they will not even make the experiment. Should one who has been cured tell them the fact, they will not yet believe; nor would they if one should rise from the dead. Such persons—those who have the truth set before them, and yet will not act—are welcome to all their tea and coffee, their fine food, their bleeding and dosing, and their sick headache.
STYE IN THE EYE.
This form of boil, occurring on the eyelid, sometimes appears as one of the disorders connected with pregnancy, more particularly in its earlier part.
Stye is much more apt to happen with those who have a disordered stomach than with the healthy. As a general rule, however, it may be regarded that boils are healthy; that is, it denotes a very good state of the vitality, when it has the power thus to throw morbid matter out of the system. Still, it is yet more healthy to have the body so pure that it has no need whatever of symptoms of the kind of which I am speaking.
A stye is much more painful than might be expected, considering its small size. This is owing both to the vehemence of the inflammation and to the excessive sensibility of the part upon which it is situated. The disturbance caused by it may become so great as to amount to a good deal of feverishness and restlessness, attended not unfrequently with a severe pain in the head.
Treatment.—We cannot do a great deal in such cases, except to let matters take their own course. It is productive of a good deal of relief to hold the eye in tepid water, and if the patient will consent to live two or three days almost wholly without food, the suffering will be rendered much less, and the stye will come the sooner to a head.
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.