The Daily Advertiser

To the Printer of the Daily Advertiser.
SIR,

I find that a medical correspondent in
your yesterday's paper, has observed,
that the only thing to give a check to the
absorption of putrid or any other virus.
when unfortunately it has become in contact
with a cut finger or any other part of
the human body that may have met with
this contingency, is to make use immediately
of an application of lunar caustic. I
wish he had been kind enough to have prescribed
the modus of confining it, for this
is a matter of the greatest consequence, as it
is an application that you cannot say to,
thus far shalt thou go, and no farther. Indeed,
notwithstanding this gentleman appears
to have some idea of the laws of absorption,
and knows that this process is
performed by a system of vessels or tubes
denominated absorbents: till he might for
a few days have suspended his presumpture;
if it was for no other reason than that
of the medical tribe lately having undergone
a monstrous casualty, one that will I very
much fear, continue too long rife. I shall,
in answer to this chaotic gentleman, offer
a method for stopping the rapid progress
of any virus which should have insinuated
itself into a wound, which I think far superior,
and one too that can be more easily
attained, and that is a cutting instrument
well known to surgeons by the appellation
of scalpel, which, in plain English, means
any kind of iron instrument to make an incision,
or to cut, shave or pare with. This
instrument, to make it less unwieldy, should
be fixed by means of a spring in a case, then
those who expose themselves to accidents,
which this correspondent has asserted the
chirurgic tribe repeatedly do, can always
have a very simple impediment against the
putrid matter in his pocket. Moreover, I
have another very coercive objection to
caustic. and that is, that it will, upon the
shortest exposition to the atmosphere, prove
itself possessed of very strong propensities
to dissolve into its pristine state, therefore a
very improper application, except in the
hand of a medical man.

April 18.