Injuries of nerves and their consequences - Reflex Sympathetic ...

TREATMENT. 269
III neuralgia, from what we call,
for want of a better
term, irritation of nerves, there is reason to believe that
some of the opiates in the form of hypodermic injection
may prove more or less curative in their action ;
but where,
as in most traumatic neuralgias, there is manifest organic
alteration of the nerve, such agents are chiefly of service
because they relieve pain, and thus enable us to bridge
over, so to speak, the many months of torture which are
needed to bring the nerve back to health again, or to
aftbrd time for electrical or other treatment. Without
some such heroic means of dulling pain, few men w'ould
be contented to await in patient agony the long months
W'hich must often pass away before relief may come,
if it come at all. This method therefore has, wnthin my
own knowledge, been the saving of a number of nerves
and of many limbs which otherwise must have been sacrificed
for the purpose of relieving unendurable pain.
At the present time this mode of using narcotics has
grown into common use, but even yet
it is scarcely estimated
at its full value. In the wards for nerve wounds in
the U. S. A. Hospital
it was almost the only plan of treating
severe neuralgic pain, so that twice or thrice a day the
resident surgeons passed around these wards with their
narcotics and hypodermic syringes, seeing, as a physician
observed to me, anguish and troubled faces before them,
and leaving behind them comfort, and even smiles. The
picture is not overdrawn, since, perhaps, few hospitals have
ever embraced at one time so many cases of horrible torture.
It was usual at one period, I believe, for the assistants
to give every morning and every night between sixty
and eighty hypodermic injections.
During one year at least forty thousand doses of various
narcotics were thus administered without an accident, and
in certain single cases upwards of five hundred hypodermic
injections were used, so that if there were no other