The above description of salivation in pregnancy may be said to apply to patients who live according to the ordinary modes of society. I have, during nine years past, known many women who have passed through pregnancy, practicing at the same time daily bathing, water-drinking, exercising regularly in the open air, with plain diet, and in no instance have I known salivation to prove at all inconvenient or troublesome. I judge that this affection, if such we may call it, can only come on when the general health is at fault, or the dietetic and other hygienic habits bad. True, there is probably always more or less increase of the salivary secretions in pregnancy, but if good habits are daily persevered in, I think no one will be troubled at all in this matter.
I find in a late work on Females—Professor Meigs’s—the following remarks on this subject, which go to show, on good authority, the uselessness of drug-treatment in this affection:
“I am sorry to tell you (the Professor addressing himself to his class), that I know of no remedy at all to be depended upon for the management of these great salivations. They are the troublesome concomitants of the gestation, and they cease with the cessation of the gestation. They cannot be cured by alkalies or acids, by venesection or purgation, or by any therapeutical treatment with which I am acquainted. If it were just, always to attribute the salivation to a state of the stomach, then it would be reasonable to apply remedies with a view to correct a faulty state of that organ, in hopes of curing the salivation.”
All this goes to prove, that you who are troubled with this affection are to depend upon the rational means, air, exercise, diet, and water-treatment, and not upon drugs, to remedy it. Mark too, how, year by year, the superiority of these hygienic and curative influences is being recognized by medical men, and how the old methods of dosing the system are going into disrepute.
HEMORRHAGE FROM THE STOMACH.
In consequence, probably, of a general fullness of the system, or perhaps from the cessation of the menstrual function, a discharge of blood sometimes takes place from the stomach, in the earlier periods of pregnancy. It is generally small in quantity, and continues but a short time. The occurrence, generally, causes a good deal of alarm to the patient, but it is seldom to be looked upon as a dangerous affection.
Treatment.—If the hemorrhage arises from too great fullness of the system, a reducing process should at once be commenced—not by drugging the system, or by blood-letting, but by abstinence and fasting.
If the discharge should be at all alarming, we should place cold wet compresses upon the abdomen; we should, in short, proceed upon the same general principles as we would in any other case of hemorrhage.
If the bleeding occurs in consequence of hard vomiting, as it sometimes may, we should take measures to arrest that symptom.
I remark, in conclusion, that this affection is a very unfrequent one, and such, in most cases, as should cause no alarm.