Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ETIOLOGY AND TREATMENT OF CERTAIN KINDS OF COUGH.‘ Cough is one of those symptoms we are called upon constantly to treat. At times the diagnosis of its cause is relatively easy, and our treatment satisfactory. It may last, it is true, for some days despite our efforts to relieve, and during this time cause moderate annoyance, or even considerable distress. Still, after a fair trial of remedies judiciously employed, a measure of benefit is obtained, and both patient and physician are hopeful as to a speedy cure, and both are tolerably satisfied with the amount of success accomplished in a given period. Again, there are cases in which we know from the first that whatever treatment may be followed the obstinate cough, in the nature of tllings, must persist, and arrest, except from increasing doses of anodynes, can rarely be effected. Such cases we are familiar with in certain forms of pulmonary and laryngeal phthisis. There are other kinds of cough which are also met with quite frequently; yet their diagnosis is made with difficulty, and their treatment despite repeated changes, fails to accomplish much in the way of abatement and cure. This is true not only of the patients who go first to the family physician in search of help, but also of those who in the beginning of their trouble gravitate toward some prominent specialist. In the class of cases where the general practitioner is usually at fault I would place the cough which is under dependence of an engorged lingual tonsil. On at least two occasions I have treated wives of prominent medical practitioners who were sufferers from annoying symptoms of this origin, although previous to my seeing and treating them the nature of the trouble had not been recognized. In these cases there was no chest affection and no apparen…
