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The Belladonna Treatment

The mixture was given every hour, day and night, for nearly 50 hours. The end of the treatment was
marked by the abundance of stools and then castor oil was given to the patient as a further purga-
tive. The treatment was also described as 'puke and purge'.Every 12 hours the patient was given CC
(Compound Cathartic) pills and Blue Mass. These were 19th century medications of varying compo-
sition. Blue Mass included mercury, and was prescribed for a cornucopia of ailments.

When a patient was admitted to the hospital while intoxicated or at the end of a spree, the first thing
that was done was to put the patient to sleep. The only medication given prior to the hypnotic was the
four CC pills. The hypnotic Lambert found best contained chloral hydrate and morphine along with
one or two grams of paraldehyde. If the patient went to sleep easily on this hypnotic it was safe to
wake him every hour for his belladonna regimen. Dr. Lambert believed it was important to adminis-
ter a small amount of strychnine every four hours. ~~ wikipedia.org

More About Towns Hospital

Towns claimed a ninety percent success rate from his cure based on the reasoning that those
people he never heard from again had been cured. Towns' reputation by the 1920s had greatly
diminished in the medical community as his claims regarding his cure became more exagger-
ated. The Towns-Lambert cure bordered on quackery.

Lambert eventually broke off his association with Towns Hospital. Towns was making claims
that his cure was guaranteed to work for any compulsive behavior, from morphinism to nicotin-
ism to caffeinism, to kleptomania and bedwetting. Lambert realized that the percentage of
those deemed to be cured needed to be greatly reduced since he had observed that a number of

people over the years kept returning for cure after cure. During the 1920s a large part of the
hospital revenues was from repeat business. ~~ wikipedia.org