AN EXCERP FROM ABERNETHY'S LECTURES.
When I was speaking of the cure of the digestive organs, I spoke of stomachic irritation, and said it was occasioned by some morbid peculiarity. It is difficult to find out the exigents; it must be done by experiment. We give a medicine, it answers. The digestive organs have such a sympathy with contiguous organs, that no wonder if such contiguous organs are affected. The liver, for instance, cannot perform its office aright if the bowels are uncomfortable. Violent drastics are wrong, they do not do good; you cannot go on giving physic every day, this will teaze the bowels and not tranquilize them, The cure is to repeat the excitement of progressive action. People in general will not find out that what may be an adequate excitement one day, may not be an adequate excitement on another day. As to these things, they are easily managed, and you should attend to them. Every person advanced in life knows this, and attends to it. Doctor Curry, whom I used to call the poetical doctor, says, very justly, "It is in medicine as it is in morals, you must break bad habits, and establish good ones."
Where the liver is primarily affected, small doses of quicksilver act in a wonderful and a prodigious manner. How the stomach, when wrong, disturbs the head, is apparent to every one. How a faulty action of the liver disturbs the head is also well known; but the liver, in an especial manner, disturbs the head.
A Yorkshireman came three hundred miles, as he told me, on purpose to see me, and he said he was going back again by the mail the same night. I asked him what could induce him to come so far. His reply was, "Why you once set up a friend of mine, and I thought you could set me up too."
I would have you keep your eyes open to this, that we are perpetually putting wrong our digestive organs by our absurdities in diet. These organs, if long wrong, will affect the spinal chord, producing lumbar numbness. Now, then, I have surveyed the influence of local maladies in disturbing the nervous energies, and now I say there is a reflected action in them, and they become a fruitful source of a numerous and dissimilar progeny of local diseases.
People are disposed to say I am apt to exaggerate too much; but I merely relate what I have seen in my time, and you will all have numerous instances by and by of making the same observations, and I think at last you will come to the same conclusions.
I now speak of local diseases; and, first, of phlegmonous inflammation. I do not much like the term phlegmonous inflammation, because phlegmon alone is inflammation. That the vessels, particularly the arteries, of inflamed parts are disposed to receive more blood, is manifest. Mr. Hunter froze the ears of rabbits, and the arteries inflamed and were filled with blood, throbbing, and pain. When there is great disturbance of the arterious system, with throbbing, there is always acute pain. In common whitlow of the finger, how the arteries of the arm, the brachial in particular, throb, is well known. In proportion as arteries are excited to vehement action, some difficulty occurs to the transmission of the blood into the veins. Dr. Phillips found that inflamed blood is slower in cooling than common blood.