In general Anæmia, an occasional purge, a generous diet, with good air and exercise should be combined, if possible, with the Chalybeate treatment.
The mineral Alkalies, their Carbonates, and neutral salts with vegetable acids. Biborate and Phosphate of Soda. Benzoic and Cinnamic acids.
Mineral and vegetable acids. Sour fruits.)
Of all the fluid secretions, the secretion of Urine is perhaps the only important one which cannot cease to be fluid without immediate damage to the system. The deposit of solid matter from this secretion is dangerous, because tending to the formation of a solid calculus in the kidney or the bladder, in neither case easily extracted, and acting like a foreign body in these sensitive organs. This urine, naturally clear and limpid, contains in it several substances which are by their nature insoluble, but are held in solution by certain other materials. But in some morbid states these latter materials may be wanting, or else the insoluble bodies may be secreted in such quantity that the solvent material is unable to hold them in solution. In such instances, these parts of the urine may either be separated by the kidneys from the blood in a solid state, or may be deposited from the urine after excretion or on cooling. They then fall down in a crystalline or finely divided state, and constitute Urinary Deposits.
Solvents are medicines which are employed to hold these insoluble substances in solution, where there is not enough of the natural solvent material in the system. They are medicines which tend, after being absorbed, to pass out of the blood into the urine. Although we are ill-informed as to the nature of the ordinary urinary solvents, yet it is evident that they must be present, because substances which are by their nature insoluble occur in healthy urine. And it is also evident that these medicines are able to supply their place; for, after one is given in a case of urinary deposit, this latter disappears, at the same time that the solvent remedy may be detected chemically in the urine.
In this, the last order of Restorative Hæmatics, a number of apparently dissimilar medicines are grouped together, all of which agree in this point of their action.