ON THE EMPLOYMENT OF NITRITE OF 

 AMYL IN THE COLLAPSE OF CHOLERA 

 [WITPI EXPERIMENTS UPON THE PUL- 

 MONARY CIRCULATION]. 



(Eeprinted from the British Medical Journal, January 13th, 1872 ; with 

 references.) 



In two papers which have recently appeared in this Journal,* 

 and in the Practitioner,^ Dr. Talfourd Jones very ably advocates 

 the use of nitrite of amyl as a remedy in the collapsed stage of 

 cholera. His proposal is, however, by no means a new one ; for 

 it was made by Dr. Chapman in 1866, as he mentions in a letter 

 to this Journal,^ and also by Dr. Gamgee about the same time. 

 At the time that I mentioned the suggestion of the latter in a 

 paper on the " Action of Nitrite of Amyl in Angina Pectoris," 

 in the Lancet for July, 1867, I was unaware that this medicine 

 had been already tried unsuccessfully by Drs. Hayden and 

 Cruise of Dublin. Shortly after the publication of my paper, I 

 obtained, through the kindness of those gentlemen, a copy of 

 their Eeport of the Cholera Epidemic of 1866, as treated in the 

 Mater Misericordioe Hospital, Dublin ; and from this§ I now 

 extract the following notices of the action of nitrite of amyl in 

 that disease. 



" When inhaled for a few minutes, he (Dr. Pdchardson) showed 

 that it is capable of so exciting the circulation, that the face 

 becomes flushed, accompanied by a thrilling sensation. It 

 occurred to us that, in virtue of this remarkable property, the 

 nitrite of amyl might be useful in re-establishing the circulation 

 in the collapse of cholera. In one case, that of a man forty-two 

 years of age, admitted in incipient collapse, the pulse rose from 



• British Medical Journal, September 30th, 1871, p. 378. 



t Practitioner, October 1871, p. 213. 



X British Medical Journal, October 7th, 1871, p. 426. 



§ Eeport of the Cholera Hpidemic, p. 56. 



