THE CHOLERA MYSTERY.

New Zealander, Volume 4, Issue 227, 2 August 1848, Page 4

THE CHOLERA MYSTERY.

No medicine lias yet been found which cnn counteract the changes in the fibrine, aud nullify the first effect of the choleraic virus in the blood. The antidote to this tremendous poison has not yet been discovered, and the resources of modern European science have opposed its destructive action with as Htt'e effect as the untutored efforts of the most barbarous nation to v?hom its ravages aie unknown. The efforts of Europeon science have, indeed, it appears to me, m many cases proved hurtful. The attempt to cut short the disease and to rouse the tyatera from a state erroneously compared to debility aud exhaustion, has certainly often accelerated the progiess of the cholera. Il is a most important piactcal point that cholera runs a ertin course — when the algyde symptom havo once shown themselves, a case cannot be cut short—oven in the mildest forms, warmth does not lelurn altogether for a loug time, buc when the disease has reached its acme, the patient it invariably seen to remain some hours in a peculiar state, during which time Nature seems to be gradually repairing the injury which has ecn done. Therefore, when a person is cold and al» most pulseless, with a heart embarrassed and reap ration nearly arreited, the attempt viuleniy to arouse him from this state by strong stimulants, by warmth to the surface, by contmued friction, or by measures of a Ike kind, seems to me to be founded altogether on a misapprehension. Before the delicate machinery of circulation and respiration can again play, hours must elapse—it medicine could only kec^ the patient alive

for there few hours, all would l>c done that art enn cvc r do. If respiration could be maintained — not the mere nuchanicrl ait of breathing in and out, but thcrhemiril piocesji, in sufficient .ntegriiy to allow the blood to cirml.te through the capillar es of the lungs — nature would gradually bi ing about the cure. This is the great problem which medicine has to accomplish, and which, next to th* discovery of gome actual antidote to the poison itself, appears to he the most rendy method o tfocomplishir-g the cure of cholera. — Reseat ches in the Pathology and Treatment of the Cholera, by Dr. hukes.