American Materia Medica, Therapeutics and Pharmacognosy

for a length of time.
It has been beneficial in spasmodic asthma, whooping cough and in
laryngismus stridulus.
This agent is advised in irritation of the bowels resulting in acute
inflammation. In small doses it is given with good results in cholera
infantum and in diarrheas, but is of no benefit beyond the acute stage.
While ipecac has been known as a cure for certain forms of dysentery for
more than a century, the use of its active principle emetine as a cure for
amebic dysentery is just now coming into prominence. Our writers have
always advised ipecac for this disease, but not all have given it in
sufficiently large doses. Administered now in the form of alcresta ipecac
or emetine hypodermically, the cures are prompt and highly satisfactory.
In fact, the remedy is already being classed with quinine for malaria, and
antitoxin for diphtheria, as one of the great specifies.
If the dysenteric tenesmus is relieved with prompt doses of gelsemium—
and we have a no more efficient remedy in the materia medica for this
condition than that agent—the beneficial effects of the ipecac upon the
local inflammatory processes will be more plainly marked.
Recent observers in the general hospital in Calcutta, India, have found
that large doses of ipecac have most beneficial effects in amebic hepatitis
and hepatic abscess. If the diagnosis be made before the formation of pus,
this is prevented by the agent. It should be given when the patient suffers
with a general feeling of lassitude, foul tongue, pain in the right shoulder
and in the right hypochondrium. The liver is enlarged and tender on
pressure. There is marked leukocytosis but the polynuclear increase is
not great. Ipecac is given in these cases in single large doses, usually
from twenty to thirty grains, given at least two hours after eating and best
taken at bedtime. Occasionally this dose is given twice daily in capsules.
Frazier claims that ipecac in large doses is an excellent addition to the
treatment of typhoid fever. In five cases where he used it, the
temperature dropped suddenly so that within four days it was normal. In
the earlier stages he gave thirty grains on the first day; twenty-five the
next; twenty the next and so on down until ten. He gave small doses of
opium to keep the patient from vomiting. The results were pronounced.
This course is worth trying.
Ellingwood’s American Materia Medica, Therapeutics and Pharmacognosy - Page 110