Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 43, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 July 1875 — Sunstroke. [ARTICLE]

Sunstroke.

Sunstroke is never the result of a few hours of unexpected heat. The name misleads people. They fancy that the sunlight strikes men clown just as does the lightning, and that-if they keep out of the sunshine they are in no danger. Now sunstroke is nothing more than iin exhaustion of the system by which the circulation is rendered abnormal. One day of sudden heat rarely exhausts a man so that the disease appears. A man who works hard in the shade on a hot day and so overheats himself may be smitten with sunstroke, while another man who walks quietly in the sunshine will experience no bad effects from it. This ignorance of the nature of sunstroke leads to the “irrational conduct of most people in their efforts to keep cool. Their usual practice is to drink vast quantities of ice-water or of soda-water with sirup. They fancy that by these means they counteract the heating tendency of the weather. On the contrary, they bike the surest means to induce sunstroke. In this disease there is always a rush of blood to the head. Now when this occurs there must be less blood in other parts of the body. Whatever drives the blood away from any part of the hod}- below the heacl increases the pressure of blood on the brain. Ice-water, of course, contracts the veins of the stomach, and thus drives the blood away from that organ. The man who fears sunstroke, or in other words fears that there will be too much blood in his veins, and who, therefore, drinks icewater, might just as well go and stand on his head. The latter would probably be the less dangerous course of the two. Soda-water with sirup is even worse than plain ice-water. It has all the evil effects which ice-water produces, and it moreover heats the system by means of the sugar which the sirup contains. To put sugar into the stomach in hot weather is like pouring petroleum on a fire in order to put it out. The result is never quite satisfactory. Still worse are all those so-called cooling drinks of which wine or spirits form a component part. They heat the blood and increase the rapidity with which the heart beats, thereby pumping more blood, into the brain. Not content -with trying to produce sunstroke by these means men frequently achieve it by persistent fretting. The exhaustion of the nerves is one of the precedent conditions of the disease, and there is nothing which exhausts the nerves so surely as fretting. An exceptionally able physician has said that mental labor never alone produces disease of the brain, but that “ worry” is the chief source of softening of the brain, and that paralysis which is distinct from apoplexy. Now if you believe all of this exceptionality able paper on sunstroke, its origin ana nature, you will comprehend why we have sometimes a hundred cases in a day in this city, while in Italy, where the heat lasts steadily for four months in the year, the disease is nearly unknown. The reason is that most Americans, ■when the hot weather begins, go into training for sunstroke, and ignorantly do everything which can produce it. What we ought to do in hot weather is evident. First, we should keep our minds easy and contented. Secondly, we should drink nothing but moderately cool water, and very little of that. Ice-water is the bane of America, and probably kills nearly as many people as alcohol. Thirdly, we should avoid so far as is possible all work which overheats and exhausts us.—“ Medicus ,” in N. Y. Graphic.