978 MODUS OPERANDI OF MERCURY, 



cury cures syphilis by creating another disease, 

 which, being incompatible with the primary one, 

 overcomes and removes it. But this is obviously 

 no explanation. And there is reason to believe, 

 that it operates either by combining with and 

 neutralizing the syphilitic virus, or by diminish- 

 ing the nutritive process, and thus enabling the 

 absorbents to remove chancres, buboes, and other 

 glandular enlargements. Dr. Billing maintains 

 very justly, that both mercury and iodine remove 

 morbid growths by starving them.* In favour 

 of this opinion, it is well known that tartarized 

 antimony, and other emetics, (which operate by 



* In a late Treatise on the Mercurial Disease, by Dr. Dietrich 

 of Munich, we are informed that it is attended with a sensation 

 of coldness, which is followed by alternations of feverish dryness 

 and profuse sweats, with salivation, a dissolved condition of the 

 blood, great prostration of strength, diarrhaea, hemorrhages, and 

 cold sweats, when mercury may be detected in all the secretions, 

 or by rubbing against the skin a piece of copper, which becomes 

 white : that if not carried out of the body through the different 

 emunctories, it produces ulceration of the soft parts, and swelling 

 of the bones, or disease of the periostium : that the worst forms 

 of the disease are attended with softening of the brain, paralysis, 

 apoplexy, madness, or loss of mental power, dropsy, rapid ema- 

 ciation, subsultus tendinum, hectic fever, and death. Alas ! how 

 many thousand lives have been sacrificed by the abuse of this 

 slow but certain poison ! Nearly the same fatal effects are pro- 

 duced by the long continued employment of iodine, which some- 

 times causes vomiting, purging, small pulse, fever, cramps, colic, 

 rapid emaciation, and death, when it is found in the blood, milk, 

 and urine of the patient. We are also informed by Orfila, that 

 four grains of iodide of potassium, when injected into the jugular 

 vein of a clog, caused convulsions and death in about one minute. 



