Vomiting.

Vomiting. The physiology of vomiting has already been discussed (see DIGESTION, Vol. III p. 817); and it only remains to indicate its significance in disease, and its treatment. It is much more common and more easily induced in children than in adults, and generally speaking in men than in women. In some cases it is entirely salutary—e.g. when poison, or food irritating in quality or excessive in quantity, has been taken, and it should be encouraged and not checked. It is common, especially in children, as a symptom of the onset of many acute diseases. When persistent or recurrent it most frequently depends upon disease of the digestive organs, particularly the stomach. But this is by no means necessarily the case; during the early months of pregnancy vomiting ('morning sickness') is so common as hardly to be abnormal; in consumption, Bright's disease (see under KIDNEYS), and disease of the brain (tumour, abscess, meningitis) it may be for a time the most prominent, or even almost the only symptom. (In the vomiting attending brain disease, rarely under other circumstances, nausea, or the sensation of sickness, may be entirely absent.) It is obvious therefore that it is of the greatest importance to discover in the first instance the real cause of the vomiting, and attempt to remove it by suitable treatment. Some of the means most generally useful in checking vomiting may, however, be mentioned. Food should be administered in a liquid form, and in very small quantities at a time (e.g. milk diluted with an equal quantity of potash-water, or lime-water, not more than a wine-glassful at once), or even for a time withheld altogether. Small pieces of ice sucked or swallowed, and a mustard poultice or fly blister applied to the pit of the stomach are often useful. Of drugs, preparations of bismuth, hydrocyanic acid, creasote, chloroform, lime-water, ipecacuan wine (in doses of a single drop every hour), opium, and morphia are among the most valuable.