The pack should be followed by the spray, the sponge bath, the douche, or the rubbing wet-sheet. It is a powerful remedy, and should not be used to excess in chronic diseases; it has been much abused in this way. Its depurating effects are really wonderful. The increased action of the skin, together with determination of blood to that part, is so great that poisons long hidden in the system are brought out and eliminated. The odor of a sheet recently used in packing a gross person is often intolerable. If the patient be a tobacco user, the sheet will be reeking with the odor of nicotine. Many times, the sheet will be actually discolored with the impurities withdrawn from the body.
The applications of the pack in treating disease are very numerous. In almost all acute diseases accompanied by general febrile disturbance, and in nearly all chronic diseases, it is a most helpful remedy if rightly managed. It is an admirable remedy for nervousness, skin diseases, and irritations of the mucous membrane. The warm pack is a remedy worth more in the treatment of children’s diseases than all the drugs in the materia medica, as many physicians have proved. It is a most successful application in convulsions.
SHOWER PACK.
In many cases of fever in which the temperature rises so high as to produce delirium, the ordinary pack does not seem to be sufficiently powerful to fully control the excessive heat. In such cases, the shower pack is found of great service; it is thus used in Bellevue Hospital, New York:—
A rubber blanket is placed upon an ordinary mattress. Upon this, the patient is placed, enveloped in a wet sheet, as in the ordinary pack. Instead of being covered with blankets, however, he is left exposed to the air, so that the powerful cooling effects of evaporation may be obtained. As the sheet becomes warmed by the heat of the body, cool water is showered upon it from a sprinkler or watering-pot. The bath is continued thus until the temperature of the patient, as indicated by the thermometer, is sufficiently diminished.
This bath, combining as it does the cooling effects of cool water and of evaporation, is the most powerful refrigerant that can be employed; yet it is perfectly safe when judiciously used, being only applied in cases of extreme urgency on account of the high temperature.
Some practice opening the ordinary pack at intervals, and sprinkling cool water upon the patient, thus obtaining, in some degree, the prolonged cooling effect. The pack must be studied well to enable one to apply it with skill, and certainty of success.
DRY SHEET PACK.
Though this can hardly be called a bath at its commencement, it really becomes a wet-sheet pack before its termination. Its application differs from that of the wet-sheet pack in that the patient is wrapped in woolen blankets instead of the wet sheet. The object of this treatment is to produce perspiration, which may be encouraged by drinking either cold or hot drinks in considerable quantity, and by the application of dry artificial heat to the feet and sides. It is a very severe form of treatment, and is now seldom practiced. Many years ago, patients at hydropathic establishments were often kept for several hours in the dry pack, smothered beneath loads of comfortables, blankets, and feather-beds. If cautiously employed, it is occasionally useful in “breaking the chills,” in fever and ague. It should be administered about half an hour before the time for the beginning of the chill, if required for this purpose.
The several varieties of local packs are described under the head of Local Baths.