CHLORINE.
Introduction
Chlorum, which was first proved by Hering in 1846, and first used in practice by Dunham, is prepared by saturating cold distilled water with chlorine gas.
Our tincture contains about one percent of chlorine gas. As it should be freshly prepared, or at least have the decided suffocating odor, I use that prepared by the druggist, and it can be kept for sometime in a rubber-stoppered bottle.
Symptoms
The marked feature of Chlorum, whether inhaled as gas or taken as a remedy to cure the condition, is a spasm of the glottis which, while it permits of comparatively free inspiration (25), shuts down on the air that one wants to get rid of. Hering putting it, “air is admitted well enough, but its exit is prevented.”
Dunham reports as follows on the effects of washing the mouth with a solution of chlorine: “Scarcely had the liquid been received into my mouth, when I became sensible of a spasmodic action of some part of the respiratory organs of the following character: Inspiration was unimpeded, and could be effected in the natural manner, but expiration was absolutely impossible not from any inability of the muscles of expiration, but from a closure of the rima glottidis; expiration being felt to be impossible, inspiration was again attempted and was accomplished fully and easily, although the act was attended by a sight crowing noise; expiration, which was again attempted, was impossible, as before. By these successive operations the lungs became inflated to a most painful degree, but so firmly did the glottis appear to be closed that it seemed as though air might pass through any part of the thoracic walls more readily than by way of the larynx.”
We make effective use of this symptom in laryngismus stridulous and in asthma (19).
Chlorum has been used in typhus fever (193), especially when the tongue was extremely dry; it seems to relieve the extreme prostration, the subsultus tendinum (183) and extreme dryness of the tongue.
I use Chlorum in the tincture.
