More than three years ago, I published (1 1Vol. ii. of the American Homoeopathic Review, 1859: “Chlorine in Spasmus Glottidis. No. 1.”) an account of the effects of the inhalation of Chlorine gas in two instances, with the record of a case in which the symptoms of the disease were so similar to the effects which I had witnessed and experienced from the inhalation of Chlorine, that I was induced to administer a solution of Chlorine gas in water. The case was rapidly cured. The following case furnishes additional evidence of the value of Chlorine in certain spasmodic affections of the glottis:
December 12th, 1862. J.S., aged fifty-two years, has suffered from follicular pharyngitis; has had the larynx and fauces swabbed, burned and parched with nitrate of silver until he could endure it no longer. For two years he has not been under medical treatment. He now suffers much from pain in the throat, and has an habitual cough and expectoration of glairy mucus. Within three days the cough has assumed a spasmodic character, with the following peculiarities:
The desire to cough results from a tickling and a sensation or rawness behind the thyroid cartilage. When the patient seeks to yield to this desire, he finds it impossible to expel the air from the chest, as is required in the act of coughing. The cough is therefore abortive, although the desire grows continually more and more intense. The obstruction to the free and sudden expulsion of air, which would constitute a cough, he describes as resulting from an apparent constriction just below the larynx. At the same time he can draw air into the lungs quite freely.
This freedom of inhalation and impeded exhalation, together with the constantly increasing tickling in the larynx which compelled the patient to make very energetic but unavailing effects to cough, continue until he sinks, exhausted and covered with sweat, upon a cough, when the spasm seems to relax and he can cough and exhale with comparative freedom. These paroxysms recur about every two hours.
I prepared immediately a weak solution of Chlorine gas in cool water, so weak that the odor of the gas could scarcely be detected, and when one of the paroxysms was at its height, administered a tea-spoonful. The effect was magical. The spasm relaxed immediately and the tickling was allayed. The dose was repeated every two or three hours, as the tickling recurred, and in the course of twenty-four hours the disposition to a recurrence of the paroxysms had ceased.
Several days afterward the patient applied to me for a quantity of “that solution,” stating that since he had taken it, his throat had been more comfortable and his voice better than they had been since the day when he was unhappily persuaded to allow caustic to be applied to his throat.
Dr. Dunham graduated from Columbia University with Honours in 1847. In 1850 he received M.D. degree at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of New York. While in Dublin, he received a dissecting wound that nearly killed him, but with the aid of homoeopathy he cured himself with Lachesis. He visited various homoeopathic hospitals in Europe and then went to Munster where he stayed with Dr. Boenninghausen and studied the methods of that great master. His works include 'Lectures on Materia Medica' and 'Homoeopathy - Science of Therapeutics'.