Medicine, Part 2. Memory.

Papers on Health
by John Kirk

(Page 17 of 21)

The whole tendency of what may be called popular pharmacy during the last few years has been in the direction of introducing to the public a great variety of powerful medicines, put up in convenient forms, and advertised in such a manner as to produce in the unthinking, a belief that they may be safely and rightly administered at all times and seasons, as remedies for some real or supposed malady. All this, of course, has been greatly promoted by column after column of advertisement in magazines and lay newspapers; but we are compelled to admit that the medical profession cannot be held free from some amount of blame in the matter or from some responsibility for the way in which drugs have lately been popularized and brought into common use as articles of domestic consumption.

Medical men have failed, we think, sufficiently to impress upon the public and upon patients that the aim of reasonable people should be to keep themselves in health rather than to be always straying, as it were, upon the confines of disease and seeking assistance from drugs in order to return to conditions from which they should never have suffered themselves to depart. The various alkaline salts and solutions, for example, the advertisements of which meet us at every turn, and which are offered to the public as specifics, safely to be taken, without anything so superfluous as the advice of medical men, for all the various evils which are described by the advertisers as gout or as heartburn, or as the consequences of 'uric acid,' do unquestionably, in a certain proportion of cases, afford temporary relief from some discomfort or inconvenience. They do this notwithstanding persistence in the habit or in the indulgence, whatever it may be, the over-eating, the want of exercise, the excessive consumption of alcohol or of tobacco, which is really underlying the whole trouble which the drugs are supposed to cure and which at the very best they only temporarily relieve, while they permit the continuance of conditions leading ultimately to degeneration of tissue and to premature death.

This is the moral which it is, we contend, the duty of the profession to draw from the daily events of life. The natural secretions of the human stomach are acid, and the acidity is subservient to the digestive functions. It cannot be superseded by artificial alkalinity without serious disturbance of nutrition; and the aim of treatment, in the case of all digestive derangements, should be to cure them by changing the conditions under which they arise, not to palliate them for a time by the neutralization of acid, which may, indeed, give relief from present trouble, but which leaves unaltered the conditions upon which the trouble really depends.

Those who look down the obituary lists of the newspapers will be struck by the fact that large numbers of people, in prosperous circumstances, die as sexagenarians from maladies to which various names are given but which are, as a rule, evidences of degeneration and of premature senility, while many who pass this period go on to enter upon an eighth or ninth decade of life. The former class, we have no doubt, comprise those who have lived without restraint of their appetites, and who have sought to allay some of the consequences thence arising by self-medication, while the latter class comprises those who have lived reasonably, and who, if annoyed by imperfect digestion, have sought relief by ascertaining and by abandoning the errors from which it sprang."

Among the most pernicious and dangerous of all the patent medicines on the market are the so-called "Headache Powders," whose almost instantaneous effects testify to the potency of the drugs they contain. Such powerful agents carry their own condemnation, for they cannot in the nature of things remove the cause of the pain; hence their action is limited to narcotizing the nerves. The disease continues, the damage goes on, but the faithful sentinels are put to sleep. These headache powders so increased the deaths from heart failure in New York City a couple of years ago that it became necessary to warn the public against them.

Memory, Loss of - A more or less complete suspension of this faculty is a not uncommon form of mental and bodily illness. We do not so much mean the mere fading of past impressions as the loss of power to recall them, so that we cannot recall what we wish to remember. This is a result of any serious bodily weakness. It will come on through any exhausting exertion, or prolonged and weakening illness. Stomach disorder will also cause it. In this last case, drinking a little hot water at intervals will usually put all right. A cup of very strong tea will so derange the stomach in some cases as to cause temporary suspension of memory. We mention these cases to prevent overdue alarm at a perhaps sudden attack. The loss of mental power in such cases does not always mean anything very serious.

Just as the stomach affects the memory, so also much use of memory and mental strain tells severely upon the stomach. Digestive failures in strictly temperate persons often arise from an overstrain of the mind.

We explain these two actions, the one of body on mind, and the other of mind on body, so that care may be taken, on both sides, of the complex nature we possess. If this is done, there will be little chance of memory failing.

Mind in Disease - Often a person, because of physical failure, becomes possessed of an utterly erroneous idea, which no reasoning can change or remove. Indeed, reasoning in such cases is best avoided. Attention should rather be directed to the physical cause of the mental state, with a view to its removal. Very probably you will find there is want of sleep, with a dry hard state of the skin of the head, and too high an internal temperature. You may then work wonders by soaping the head (see Head, Soaping). The back also should be soaped similarly. If too great a cooling effect is produced by this, wipe off the soap and rub hot olive oil on the back instead. If this is not sufficient, rub the limbs also with the hot oil. We have seen the most pronounced insanity yield to this treatment, where the cause has been physical and not mental. The secret of success is in so balancing the heat and cooling applications that the utmost possible soothing can be given without any chill.

Printed by Hurst Bros., Shaw Heath, Stockport. 1904.