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The Nashville (Tenn.) Journal of Medicine and Surgery contains an article on the above subject by J. W. Brown, M. D., the substance of which will be of interest to many of our readers, He states that dysentery is the principal disease with which the physician has to contend in Tennessee, Arkansas and North Louisiana, and in some localities the mortality is frightful. Drs. McMath and Weilder, of Louisville, Ark., informed him that they had treated three hundred cases of the most aggravated form with success by the use of creosote, and in every case in which it was given (if not delayed too long), a marked improvement invariably took place. The following is the formula used by these gentlemen:—Creosotum, 10 drops ; acetic acid, 20 drops; sulphate of morphine, 2 grains—all mixed in an ounce of distilled water. A teaspoonful of this is given every three or four hours to adults; smaller doses are given to children ingum arabic mucilage. Drs. McMath and Weilder consider it nearly, if not entirely, a specific in dysentery. This disease is sometimes very fatal and prevalent in all parts of our country, and children about two years old, in the cities, are very liable to be attacked with it in the months of July, August and September. Creosote and morphine alone, we understand, are given in such cases by our New York physicians, but with what general success, we can not tell. If the above recipe is a certain remedy for the disease, a knowledge of this fact should be promulgated to the ends of the earth.
