STARVATION.
The most cautious and discreet exhibition of aliment is essential in all cases where the victim of starvation has been long deprived of food. Death often rapidly supervenes where the sufferer is permitted to suddenly satisfy cravings of hunger following a forced abstinence from food. The most easily digestible substances should be sparingly administered at very short intervals, and milk, beef tea or meat juices afford the safest means of supplying these. Rectal alimentation may always be resorted to in order to supplement stomach feeding. Solids must be sparingly administered for some time or entirely withheld until the digestive organs recover sufficient tone. White fish, boiled, is the best form in which to commence the exhibition of solids. Children and infants, upon being rescued from a state of acute or chronic starvation, do best upon diluted warm pep tonised milk, with a limited amount of beef juice.
The state of the body temperature should receive attention. In starva tion this falls so low as to cause death, and life may be saved in some cases by a prompt application of dry heat to the body of the victim rescued from starvation. In some cases heat is more urgently demanded than food. It is advisable to apply hot-water bottles and warm flannels and cotton-wool rather than at first to attempt friction or massage, which might possibly, under such circumstances, extinguish life. The hypodermic injection of hot Saline solution will always prove useful.
In the voluntary starvation of lunatics the gag and the rubber tube of a stomach-pump may he employed to convey liquid food into the stomach, and where there is difficulty in introducing the tube through the mouth, it must be passed into the pharynx through the nose.