Digitalis : its mode of action, and its use : an enquiry illustrating the effect of remedial agents over diseased conditions of the heart : the Hastings prize essay of the British Medical Association for 1870 / by J. Milner Fothergill.

  • Fothergill, John Milner, 1841-1888.
Date:
1871
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Digitalis : its mode of action, and its use : an enquiry illustrating the effect of remedial agents over diseased conditions of the heart : the Hastings prize essay of the British Medical Association for 1870 / by J. Milner Fothergill. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    would otherwise be rendered inutile, is a problem which it is in the province of medicine to solve. That even with our present imperfect knowledge of these agents, much has been and is being done by numbers of enthusiastic workers at this field of inquiry, is unquestionable. In the present consideration of the mode of action of digitalis, the writer has striven so to arrange his materials as not only to elucidate the agency of it, but also to establish some broad rules applicable to the agents as a class,’ if once the action of the drug, as being capable of increasing ventricular contraction, be established. In order, then, to elucidate as far as possible this subject both particularly and generally, the action of morbid processes and the mode by which Nature proceeds to spontaneously repair them, or to compensate the lesions, have been subjected to critical review, and their indications recorded. The subject is one which must necessarily require great labour and pains to bring to anything like perfection, and any- thing written here must be considered as necessarily incomplete. The consideration of the question of in- creased ventricular contraction has been so conducted as neither to include nor exclude the question as to whether this group of agents are cardiac sedatives or tonics ; in fact, it becomes moi’e and more difficult to draw a dis- tinction betwixt the two. The writer has thus striven to avoid all controversial enquiry on these heads, and by laying down the increased ventricular contraction as the action par excellence of digitalis, has striven so to conduct the investigation as not only to fix, to some extent at least, the action of the agent, and to demonstrate how it affects morbid conditions, but also to clear so much ground towards the successful investigation of allied agents, and the establishment of a new class of agents whose importance