Vomiting Quotes (3 quotes)
A man of about fifty-four years of age, had begun, five or six months before, to be somewhat emaciated in his whole body...a troublesome vomiting came on, of a fluid which resembl’d water, tinctur’d with soot.... Death took place.... In the stomach...was an ulcerated cancerous tumour.... Betwixt the stomach and the spleen were two glandular bodies, of the bigness of a bean, and in their colour, and substance, not much unlike that tumour which I have describ’d in the stomach.
About stomach cancer. In De Sedibus Causis Morborum (1761). Translated by Benjamin Alexander in The Seats and Causes of Diseases (1960), 43
One cannot help a man to come to accept his impending death if he remains in severe pain, one cannot give spiritual counsel to a woman who is vomiting, or help a wife and children say their goodbyes to a father who is so drugged that he cannot respond.
'The Principles of Symptom Control', in Ina Ajemian, Balfour M. Mount. (eds.) The R.V.H. Manual on Palliative/Hospice Care (1980), 176.
The main thing that induces me to question the safeness of the vulgar methodus medendi in many cases is the consideration of the nature of those Helps they usually employ, and some of which are honoured with the title of Generous Remedies. These helps are Bleeding, Vomiting, Purging, Sweating, and Spitting, of which I briefly observe in General, that they are sure to weaken or discompose when they are imployed, but do not certainly cure afterwards.
RSMS 199, Folio 177v. Michael Hunter identfies as passages or a suppressed work, Considerations and Doubts Touching the Vulgar Method of Physick. Quoted In Barbara Kaplan (ed.), Divulging of Useful Truths in Physick: The Medical Agenda of Robert Boyle (1993), 138.