CHAP. XVIIOf MALIGNANT FEVERS:The danger of applying living animals in them. #248. It is necessary t
CHAP. XVIIOf MALIGNANT FEVERS:The danger of applying living animals in them.#248. It is necessary to eradicate a prejudice that prevails among country-people, with regard to the treatment of these fevers; not only because it is false and ridiculous, but even dangerous too. They imagine that the application of animals can draw out the poison of the disease; in consequence of which they apply poultry, or pigeons, cats or sucking pigs to the feet, or upon the head of the patient, having first split the living animals open. Some hours after they remove their strange applications, corrupted, and stinking very offensively; and then ascribe such corruption and horrid stink to the poison they suppose their application to be charged with; and which they imagine to be the cause of this fever. But in this supposed extraction of poison, they are grossly mistaken, since the flesh does not stink in consequence of any such extraction, but from its being corrupted through moisture and heat: And they contract no other smell but what they would have got, if they had been put in any other place, as well as on the patient’s body, that was equally hot and moist. Very far from extracting the poison, they augment the corruption of the disease; and it would be sufficient to communicate it to a sound person, if he was to suffer many of these animal bodies, thus absurdly and uselessly butchered, to be applied to various parts of his body in bed, and to lie still a long time with their putrified carcases fastened about him, and corrupting whatever air he breathed there.With the same intention they often fasten a living sheep to the bed’s foot for several hours; which, though not equally dangerous, is in some measure hurtful, since the more animals there are in a chamber, the air of it is proportionably corrupted, or altered at least from its natural simplicity, by their respiration and exhalations: But, admitting this to be less pernicious, it is equally absurd.~ADVICE to PEOPLE in General, WITH Respect to their Health, Vol 1 by Samuel Auguste André David Tissot, 1766 -- source link
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