A Century of Service - Eoin O'Brien

The Voluntary Hospital Movement and the Dublin School
bleeding and blistering. The story goes that one day on his rounds, he was struck by
the healthy appearance of a patient recently recovered from severe typhus fever and
said to his students: “This is the effect of our good feeding, and gentlemen, lest when
I am gone, you may be at a loss for an epitaph for me, let me give you one in three
words: ‘He fed fevers’.” Graves had made the logical observation that a healthy man
starved for weeks became weakened, but that oddly the medical profession expected
a man ill with fever to improve when denied food and continuously bled. He
attributed many fatalities to this form of therapy and advocated frequent meals of
steak, mutton or fowl, washed down with wine and porter. 61
Though he did practice bleeding, cupping and blistering, he called for moderation
in the application of these techniques and, horrified by the excesses of blistering, he
introduced what he called “flying blisters,” 62 whereby rather than protract the blister
he kept up “a succession of blisters along the inside of the legs, and over the anterior
and inner parts of the thighs.” 63 He was quite proud of the acceptance of this
modified technique: “If I have done nothing better, I think I deserve some merit for
being the first to reprobate the practice of keeping on blisters for twelve, eighteen
and twenty-four hours, and for having shown by numerous experiments that a much
shorter period of time was required to ensure the full effect of these remedies.” 64
Corrigan was preaching a similar philosophy on the north side of the city. He
disapproved strongly of treatment that weakened and depleted the patient.
Discussing a child suffering from episodes of palpitation he commented: “In some
of those cases there is a disposition to bleed from the nose, and the haemorrhage is
occasionally very profuse, and this, coupled with pain of the side, which is
occasionally present, leads to treatment not calculated to amend the symptoms. The
boy is denied animal food. He is sent to the infirmary of the school, and given tartar
emetic and bled, or lowered in other ways by purgative or nauseating medicine.” 65
Corrigan’s alternative was sea air, sea-bathing, a full diet, wine and iron. On another
occasion he took the French physician Bouillaud to task for his treatment of acute
rheumatism. “A patient treated on Bouillaud’s plan has to recover from what is worse
than the disease, the debility, which is the necessary result of the frequent bleedings
coup sur coup, of cupping, tight bandaging, blisters and mercurial cerates, for he uses
all those adjuvants as he calls them.” 66 Corrigan advocated opiates in generous dosage
together with local measures to relieve the pain and swelling of the inflamed joints.
Whether or not this resulted in much opium addiction is debatable, but at least “the
patient cured by opium has neither bleeding, blistering, nor mercury, to recover from
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