The Hypodermic Use of Hematinics in the Treatment of Anemia in Children, With Report of Cases

Abstract

PHILADELPHIAThe hypodermic use of medicaments calculated to make a deep and rapid impression on the blood and the blood-making organs and to combat certain infections is not new. For many years, in the treatment of secondary and tertiary syphilis, it has been the custom, originally amongst the Latins, and more latterly amongst American clinicians, to administer mercury subcutaneously. For rapidity of effect this method of giving the drug is without a peer. Of late years considerable interest has been directed toward the administration in this manner of drugs whose purpose was to overcome diseases essential to the blood itself, blood dyscrasias and blood deterioration dependent on systemic or local infection or toxemia. The old adage "remove the cause" as the primary act to be accomplished has, with reference to the treatment of many diseases, become stale and trite, and, in a vast number of instances, is more easily said than done. It becomes necessary, therefore, to combat the results of infection or toxemia by placing in the blood current substances which, if they do not destroy the circulating cause, at least mitigate its influence by supplying pabulum which continuously makes up for that which is being destroyed, thereby improving directly the quality of the blood and indirectly com¬ bating the etiologic factor.In no class of cases do the foregoing conditions obtain with greater emphasis than in the anemias of childhood. Here the causative element, either tangible or not, is often not readily destroyed, or if it be, its by-effects remaining for some period, the indication to be met is to increase the amount of hemoglobin and the number of red cells in the blood. Aside from the administration of good food, fresh air and the improvement of environmental conditions, as is well known, the best results are obtained by the administration of so-called hematinics, of which, up to the present, iron and arsenic furnish the best examples. Both, however, interfere with digestion, and the former is absorbed with great tardiness, the largest portion of that ingested being expelled as the sulphid of iron. The latter causes nausea and diarrhea and may seriously