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Dr George Stuart Hawthorne
Dr George Stuart Hawthorne was a nineteenth century British doctor who claimed to have an “infallible” treatment for cholera during the epidemic of that disease in his home town of Liverpool in 1848-9. Cholera is a disease which causes death by the rapid loss of fluid and body salts by profuse diarrhoea and vomiting. The modern treatment for this disease is by fluid and salt replacement.

He had encountered the disease in 1832 in Belfast when he was a senior physician in Belfast during a previous outbreak in that city. His criticism of fellow doctors during the outbreak in Belfast for using Mercury to treat the disease was bitter. He said that he would have thought that: “the destructive effects already produced by the bleeding and calomelizing (Mercury based) system, pursued, and so much recommended by Dr M’Cormac, had already satisfied that gentleman’s mind to satiety. I thought that the cries of widowed mothers, and of the orphan children of those who had been sacrificed by trusting to this method of cure had before this time reached his heart”Twenty five senior doctors in Belfast signed a letter published in the Belfast News- Letter condemning his breach of professional etiquette .When the 1848 epidemic struck Liverpool Dr Hawthorne was no less stringent in his attacks on his medical colleagues. However in the 1848 outbreak he gained the support of the local newspaper the Liverpool Mercury to publicise his case. This newspaper published uncritically his claim to cure one hundred per cent of patients brought to him, as long as they had not entered the dying phase of the illness.The accepted method of treating the disease in 1848  was to bleed the patient or to prescribe a mercury based medicine called Calomel. Indeed Dr Hawthorne had used this treatment himself in Belfast until he became dissatisfied with it .In a pamphlet entitled “The True Pathological Nature of Cholera and an Infallible Method of Treating It in a Series of Letters”, Dr Hawthorne advocated the following four stage treatment for the disease. First he argued that what was required was a treatment that would  “restore to the blood whatever amount of its natural fluidity it may have lost by the previous escape of the serous fluid”. To achieve this he advocated that the patient  be laid flat so that the blood might get to the brain even in its depleted state.Second, he advocated the use of very large amounts of opium. He advocated giving patients up to 800 milligrams of opium in pill form. He considered that opium was a brain stimulant and would restore to the central nervous system the capacity to control the loss of fluid.Third he argued that ‘cordials’ should be given to the patient: camphor, ether, alcohol which would assist the opium in its work.Fourth, he applied hot sandbags to the skin of the patient. These were intended to produce in the patient dramatic perspiration. This would have the effect of diverting the depleting stores of body fluids away from the gut and towards the skin: “Perspiration gives us the power of refilling these (fluid depleted ) vessels and of restoring the necessary fluidity of their contents”While these four strands of his treatment were under way  the patient was to be given: ““warm diluting drink is to be administered to furnish an abundant supply of suitable fluid to the absorbent vessels”Dr Hawthorne claimed this treatment to cure everybody not already moribund with the disease. His medical colleagues were less than impressed by his cure or by the support he received from the Liverpool Mercury, which had berated the medical establishment arguing that “in setting their faces against his system…every death which occurs in consequence of their obstinacy or neglect, inculpates them in the moral guilt of murder” In reply one leading doctor in Liverpool castigated the Mercury arguing that it  “is to blame to lend itself to puff a man who has no better, no higher merit than an immense stock of impudence and assurance and an immense amount of ignorance” .Matters came to a head in the summer of 1849. Dr Hawthorns son Hans, also a doctor, treated a woman using the above cure. Over the next few days she faded and died. She was treated by two other doctors after Dr Hans Hawthorne. These latter doctors refused to sign a death certificate, arguing that she had died of opium poisoning, thus precipitating an inquest. At the inquest Hans Hawthorne demonstrated that he had not given any opium to the lady for five days before her death. The inquest returned a verdict of death by natural causes within five minutes .This humiliating defeat for the medical establishment in Liverpool coincided with the gradual tailing off of the disease in the Autumn and winter of 1849. With the end of the disease Dr Hawthorne disappeared from view in Liverpool and he lived out the rest of his life as an obscure provincial doctor

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