Dripread - Book

employed
for children. Tartar emetic should never be given, as it is excessively
depressing, and uncontrollable in its effects. The stomach pump can only
be used by skillful hands, and even then with caution.

Opium and other Narcotics--After vomiting has occurred, cold water
should be dashed over the face and head. The patient must be kept awake,
walked about between two strong persons, made to grasp the handles of a
galvanic battery, dosed with strong coffee, and vigorously slapped.
Belladonna is an antidote for opium and for morphia, etc.; its active
principles; and, on the other hand, the latter counteract the effects of
belladonna. But a knowledge of medicine is necessary for dealing with
these articles.

Strychnia--After emetics have been freely and successfully given, the
patient should be allowed to breathe the vapor of sulphuric ether,
poured on a handkerchief and held to the face, in such quantities as to
keep down the tendency to convulsions. Bromide of potassium, twenty
grains at a dose, dissolved in syrup, may be given every hour.

Alcoholic Poisoning should be combated by emetics, of which the sulphate
of zinc, given as above directed, is the best. After that, strong coffee
internally, and stimulation by heat externally, should be used.

Acids are sometimes swallowed by mistake. Alkalies, lime water,
magnesia, or common chalk mixed with water, may be freely given, and
afterward mucilaginous drinks, such as thick gum water or flaxseed tea.

Alkalies are less frequently taken in injurious strength or quantity,
but sometimes children swallow lye by mistake. Common vinegar may be
given freely, and then castor or sweet oil in full doses--a
tablespoonful at a time, repeated every half hour or two.

Nitrate of silver when swallowed is neutralized by common table salt
freely given in solution in water.

The salts of mercury or arsenic (often kept as bedbug poison), which are
powerful irritants, are apt to be very quickly fatal. Milk or the whites
of eggs may be freely given and afterward a very thin paste of flour and
water. In these cases an emetic is to be given after the poison is
neutralized.

Phosphorus paste, kept for roach poison or in parlor matches, is
sometimes eaten by children and has been willfully taken for the purpose
of suicide. It is a powerful irritant. The first thing to be done is to
give freely of magnesia and water; then to give mucilaginous drinks as
flaxseed tea, gum water or sassafras pith and water; and lastly to
administer finely powdered bone-charcoal, either in pill or in mixture
with water.

In no case of poisoning should there be any avoidable delay in obtaining
the advice of a physician, and, meanwhile, the friends or bystanders
should endeavor to find out exactly what has been taken, so that the
treatment adopted may be as prompt and effective as possible.

KEEP STILL.

Keep still. When trouble is brewing, keep still. Even when slander is
getting on its legs, keep still. When your feelings are hurt, keep
still, till you recover from your excitement at any rate. Things look
differently through an unagitated eye. A doctor relates how once in a
commotion he wrote a letter, and sent it, and wished he had not. "I had
another commotion and wrote a long letter; but life had rubbed a little
sense into me. I kept that letter in my pocket against the day when I
could look it over without agitation and without tears. I was glad I
did. Less and less it seemed necessary to send it I was not sure it
would do any hurt, but in my doubt I leaned to reticence, and eventually
it was destroyed."

PHILOSOPHICAL FACTS.

The greatest height at which visible clouds ever exist does not exceed
ten miles.

Air is about eight hundred and fifteen times lighter than water.

The pressure of the atmosphere upon every square foot of the earth
amounts to two thousand one hundred and sixty pounds.

The violence of the expansion of water when freezing is sufficient to
cleave a globe of copper of such thickness as to require a force of
27,000 pounds, to produce the same effect.

During the conversion of ice into water one hundred and forty degrees of
heat are absorbed.

Water, when converted into steam, increases in bulk eighteen hundred
times.

In one second of time--in one beat of the pendulum of a clock--light
travels two hundred thousand miles. Were a cannon ball shot toward the
sun, and were it to maintain full speed, it would be twenty years in
reaching it, and yet light

The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing / A Manual of Ready Reference