YANDELL on Spasmodic Cholera.



add, however, that I ceased to use them so generally after
the first weeks of the epidemic, without finding the result of
my practice less satisfactory.
  Upon the whole, therefore, while 1 regard emetics as sal-
utary in certain conditions of the system, my experience
does not warrant me in concluding that they are indispensa-
ble to the cure, much less, that they possess that perfect con-
trol over the disease which they seemed to have in the hands
of a few physicians in other places. Nor have I witnessed
any of those effects which are so much dreaded by many
others, and which are said occasionally to result from their
operation. I can only give my own experience. I have
found them often efficient, and always safe. That they have
always proved so, when administered indiscriminately, or by
ignorant persons, I do not venture to affirm. Cases have
been mentioned to me, I feel bound to confess, in which,
from being injudiciously given, perhaps, they operated slow-
ly, and with difficulty, producing great nausea and prostration,
and appearing to contribute to the rapid march of the disease.
  Every where, cholera in this stage has been consider-
ed a curable disease. The profession have labored to im-
press upon the people the importance of arresting it here.
And certain it is, that when allowed to go further,
all plans of treatment have been too often unavail-
ing. The success attending the treatment in this stage
will depend upon the disposition of the disease to hasten in-
to the succeeding one. If it lingers in this for a day or two,
there is comparatively little danger of a failure. If taken
at the onset, eight or ten hours may be a-sufficient period
for checking it. But where the transition is more sudden,
the patient may be in collapse before the medicine given has
had time to operate, and here, however promptly met, the
case generally issues in death. Such must be the general
result of those cases where collapse succeeds immediately to
diarrhcea-unusual cases it is true, but yet occurring so of-
ten, in the truly epidemic form of the disease, as always
greatly to swell its mortality. Every physician had more orI



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