Excerpt from History of the Cholera Controversy: With Directions for the Treatment of the Disease It will, I trust, be admitted by all unprejudiced readers of this history that the theory which attributed choleraic collapse mainly to the loss of water by the stomach and bowels, and suggested the repressive treatment by opium - this theory, plausible as it appeared, is an erroneous theory, based on an incomplete observation of' the symp toms of the disease, and constructed by men who had but an imperfect knowledge of the physiology of the circulation of the blood. In fact, when this theory was first promulgated, more than sixty years ago, the most accomplished physiologists of that day had no knowledge of the structure and functions of the muscular-walled arterioles. It was not until some years later that the important discovery was made that the resisting force of the contracting arterioles is more than equal to the propelling power of the heart so that by the conjoint action of these Lilliputian stop-oooks the circulation may be speedily and completely arrested. This great physiological discovery is the kev to the pathology of the collapse stage of cholera. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.