By these means, the parts will be preserved clean, and will derive benefit from the soothing influence of warmth; and, in many cases, this will be the means of averting chordee or swelled testicle.
Where, however, from peculiar circumstances, warm water and warm baths are not to be had, the penis should be bathed in cold water, or encircled with pledgets of rags or lint, moistened with cold goulard or rose-water. Warm, however, is to be preferred, although cold water seldom fails of affording relief.
To lessen the acrimony of the urine, which keeps up the irritability, and somewhat to lower the system, all strong drinks, such as ale, beer, wine, and spirits, should be avoided, and milk, tea, barley-water, toast and water, linseed tea, gum arabic in solution, and other such mucilaginous diluting liquors taken instead. The diet should be lowered: in fact, a spare regimen should be adopted, not wholly abstaining from animal food, but partaking of it only once in the day, and carefully excluding all salted meats, rich dishes, soups, gravies, &c. The usual employment should be suspended, and rest should be taken as much as possible in a recumbent posture.
Of course the preceding remarks apply only to cases of severity; I mean such cases as first attacks ordinarily prove; and which remarks, if attended to, will greatly mitigate the violence of the disease.
To assist the foregoing treatment, the aperient medicine, which should be repeated, at least, on alternate days, until the inflammation is ameliorated, should be followed by some saline or demulcent medicine to allay the general disturbance. Several formulæ are suggested for that purpose, suitable to various temperaments and conditions—[See Forms [2], [3], [4], [5] in Formulæ annex.]
By these means, the disease, if not aggravated by intemperance of living, or otherwise, will gradually subside, and in the course of a fortnight or three weeks, cease entirely, without the aid of any other remedy whatever.
But we need not rest satisfied with merely “showing” the disease through its stages; we can expedite it, and many of its steps we can skip over, and here it is we may call to our aid the specific method of treatment alluded to. This specific method consists of the suspension of a vitiated secretion, and a restoration of a healthy one. Now how this is effected we know not; we only know that it can be done—and experience has taught us that it may be done safer at one time than another. During the existence of a fevered state of the circulation, it would be highly impolitic suddenly to check a discharge from any surface, much less one situated like the mucous membrane of the urethra, in the immediate connexion, as it is, of important nerves and glandular structures—a metastasis of the inflammation will almost invariably ensue; and hence we account for swollen testicles, buboes, painful affections of the bladder, &c. Whereas, on the subsidence of inflammation, the revulsion is borne; and to our satisfaction, the disease disappears. A constitution in a state of excitement is like a fretted child—it will have its “will” out, and the rod is not always the safest corrective.
On the subsidence, therefore, of the scalding, and a lessening of the general fever, the specific plan of treatment may be commenced. Upon the same principle that the surgical treatment is selected according to the symptoms, so also are the just-named preliminaries in many cases dispensable, and hence, as hereafter detailed, it will be found that the antiphlogistic and specific do not go always hand in hand. However, to explain the latter:—
By specifics are meant those remedies that exert a positive curative effect on a particular disease; and the most prominent of those, in gonorrhœa, are copaiba and cubebs. See Formulæ annex for some useful recipes of both—Forms [6], [7], [8], [9], [10].