Maxy Chinese doctors well remember the cholera of 1860 and 1862. They keep account of both these years as times when this fell disease was most destructive of human life in their country. A leading article in one of the Shanghai daily newspapers in Chinese, written by a well-informed native phy-simian, gives the views of his class on the treatment that should be regarded as most suitable. He starts with saying that most men who die from cholera owe their death not so much to the disease itself as to the incompetency of the native doctors in attendance. They do not attend to the real nature of the disease, and they treat only its outer manifestation. Then, he says, in persons attacked there is a lack of healthy strength and a liability to fatigue. They get hot by day by exposure, and sleep in draughts by night unprotected. Such persons if they take food at irregular intervals and sometimes xo with empty stomach: are predisposed for cholera, which may enter with the breath through the! lungs and the stomach, thus passing into the intestines. The way he puts it is peculiar. The lungs control the skin and hair. Che violent perspiration shows that the lungs are affected, as the vomiting shows that the stomach is disordered. ''he spasms indicate that the liver is affected, because the amuseles are under the control of that organ. If a good doctor is not called soo the liver will be reached and spasms will begin, Should wise treatment still be delayed the heart and spleen will be affected and then the tongue will curl up and death will ensue. Sometimes the process is quicker and death occurs after from two to four hours. This is because the evil influence entering from without strikes directly into the seat ut the "cold principle" in the lower intestines. serio. his own, as he says, very suc-This physician then proceeds to
cessful mode of treating cholera. He diarrhoea, low pulse, cold limbs, perspiranotices seven—symptoms—vouiting, tion, spasms, and exhaustion. He at once orders frum the druggist a prepared dose to be heated at the patient's house and taken warm to the extent of a good sized tea-cupful. In this dose the main things are such drugs as ginger, ginseng, Chinese cardamoms and a sort of caraway seed. After this the patient receives atractylodes alba, called pes hu by the apothecaries, a medicine of which the Chinese think' a great deal as aromatic tonic and stimulant. They use Piszs, chronic lysentery, andrheumatism. it in cases of profuse sweating and apon tt belongs to the cyearacea among the species of which are found many plants known in Europe as furnishing useful stomachic and febrifuge medicines. If the disease progresses sha is applied to some five or six still into the spasmodic state with diseases, in part summer and autumn numbness of the limbs this physician epidemics, cholera, and in part would use pwonia albiflora, the poche prevailing in the winter and spring. of the native apothecaries, with boymia All have appeared in China in the rutwcarpa, wud a pepperwort which ith, 18th, or 19th centuries for the they call wuchuyii. Our druggists know first time. 'The term /o loan, also it by the name wanthorylum piperitum. applied to different kinds of cholera, is Tt is one of the commoner aromatic an ancient name, descriptive of it' stimulants in China and in Japan. To the old times when it was not yet this he adds cinnamon bark, epidemic. The reader will judge for him-Tu 1861-1863, he remarks, when the self as to the drags the names of which cholera reached Shanghai it was a time have been mentioned above. They when the people were crowded indis-are really not very different from what criminately in an insufficient number are found in western practice. Chinese of dwellii Refugees had arrived in doctors appear from what is here said thousands, escaped from the daily scenes to be fond of using mild remedies, while of burning and fighting which were they avoid those which are very power-witnessed over all the adjoining counful' in their operation; as' to. the try at that time. He notices that the nature of the medicines, they are on the sanitary conditions were such that the whole much the same as our own, people were specially lo to be attacked by cholera. It was then that this physician tried his methods and
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.