When I order the bark with wine, I do not restrict the patient intirely to a milk diet; but make him take the bark in the morning and the milk at night. For some patients, however, I have been obliged to invert that order; the wine taken in the morning not agreeing with their stomach, and constantly making them vomit.
When I employ mineral waters, I make them drink first some bottles pure, before I proceed to have them mixed with milk.
When the disorder is inveterate it commonly degenerates into a cacochymia, a general depravation of the humors, or ill habit of the body; the cure of which must be proceeded upon before you attempt to restore strength. In this case it is that evacuants are sometimes indispensably necessary, and prove of great service. Whereas restoratives, nutritious aliments, milk, ordered in these circumstances, may throw the patient into a slow fever, and he will rather find his strength diminish in proportion to the use he makes of them.
When violent excesses shall have thrown one suddenly into such a considerable weakness as to give room of fear for the patient’s life, recourse should be had to active cordials. Spanish wines may be given him with a little bread, or some good broths with new laid eggs: he should be put to bed directly, and have some flannels applied to his breast, steeped in wine, warmed with Theriaca.
As to those cases, in which venereal excesses have occasioned an acute fever, bleeding should not be used, unless indicated by the fullness and hardness of the pulse; and it is better to take the quantity of blood at two different times bleeding, than all at once. The white decoction, barley water with a little milk, some doses of nitre, some glisters with a decoction of mullein flowers, some warm bathings for the feet; and as to aliments, some veal-broth, thickened with barley or the like grain; these are the remedies indicated by right practice, and such as I have seen succeed very happily and quickly, in those cases in which I have employed them.
The symptoms rarely require any particular method of cure, and yield to the general one. You may sometimes, however, join external corroboratives to the internal ones, where it may be proper to strengthen any particular part. I have myself often advised, with success, epithems or aromatic plaisters for the breast. Nor is it sometimes unserviceable to wrap the testicles in a soft flannel, steeped in some corroborative liquid, and to support them by means of a suspensory.
Here also may be placed what M. Gotter says: “I have sometimes cured the gutta serena, occasioned by venereal excesses, by employing internal corroboratives, and errhines, or nasal cephalic powders, which, by the slight irritation they produced, determined a greater afflux of the animal spirits to the optic nerve[129].”
It would be needless here to enter on greater particularities of the method of cure; whatever extension I might give them, they would never be sufficient to guide the sick without the assistence of a physician, to whom they would be superfluous. I have, indeed, treated the more largely of the regimen, because that, when the disorder has as yet made no great progress, that alone, joined to the cessation of the cause, might operate a cure, and that any one might confine himself to it without any danger.