Stimulants and narcotics, their mutual relations : with special researches on the action of alcohol, aether, and chloroform on the vital organism / Francis Edmund Anstie.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Anstie, Francis Edmund, 1833-1874, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Stimulants.

Narcotics.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xxiv, 414 pages)

Other Title:

Stimulants and narcotics

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia : Lindsay and Blakiston, 1865.

Summary:

The purpose of this work is, of necessity, imperfectly represented by its title page. No sentence of moderate length would have expressed the whole scope of the inquiry; a few prefatory words are therefore particularly needed, in order that the reader may appreciate the objects aimed at. These objects are two-to destroy and to reconstruct; or rather to show, in some degree, how reconstruction may be possible in the future. The historical chapter on the origin of the doctrine of stimulus makes no attempt at an exhaustive treatment of its subject, my only aim being to prove clearly that the source of the Vitalistic notions on which our classification of remedies is based is to be found in certain metaphysical theories. The dynamical terms which many modern writers employ ought not to be permitted to deceive us; they are, in fact, but the artificial clothing of a mode of research which is unconsciously but purely metaphysical, and, as such, extremely unfitted for. the purposes of the physiologist or the physician. It is the mixture of a phraseology based on this kind of speculation with a perfectly skeptical empiricism in practice, which has brought the science of therapeutics into the extraordinary state of confusion in which we see it at the present day. It is the profound conviction that a complete review of our principles of classification is necessary, if experimental inquiry is to bring us any advantage, which has induced me to write the first two hundred and forty pages of the present volume.

Contents:

History of the doctrine of stimulus and its philosophical origin in the vital theories of the ancients

Criticism of the doctrine of stimulus

Suggestions for the reconstruction of the doctrine of stimulus

The definition of narcosis

Symptoms of narcosis

On certain bodily conditions which are unfavorable to the production of narcosis

On the relation which stimulation and narcosis bear to each other, in the action of those substances which are capable of producing both

General conclusions

Æther-narcosis

Stimulant action of æther

The phenomena of non-fatal chloroform-narcosis

Phenomena of fatal chloroform-narcosis

The stimulant action of chloroform Narcotic effects of alcohol

True alcoholic stimulation.

Notes:

Description based on print version record.