A new inquiry into the causes, symptoms, and cure, of putrid and inflammatory fevers : with an appendix on the hectic fever, and on the ulcerated and malignant sore throat. ... / By William Fordyce.

  • William Fordyce
Date:
1777
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A new inquiry into the causes, symptoms, and cure, of putrid and inflammatory fevers : with an appendix on the hectic fever, and on the ulcerated and malignant sore throat. ... / By William Fordyce. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    71/252 (page 51)
    £e&. 4.] PUTRID FEVERS. $i he advances in his third Epidemic, and elfewhere, that the old phyficians were acquainted with putrid fevers full of crudity, of very long duration, and cured by natural or artificial evacuations of bile. Galen fays exprefsly, that <c where the juices cc putrified alike in all the veffels, but efpecially in “ the large ones, it was underflood to be a Conti** cc nued, or Continual Putrid fever.” They did not indeed confider, under the name of Putrefcency in fevers* fuch a corruption of the humours as happens in dead bodies, but only a remarkable de¬ generacy in them from their natural flate. We know that even found juices, either left in quiet, or in a certain degree of heat, or that are very much flirted, acquire a tendency to putrefaction; ana that their natural propenfity to this flate in- creafes in proportion to their motion and heat, though they do not arrive at the flrongeil degree of it: for their acrimony goes on to affefl the brain and cerebellum in fuch a degree, as to defcroy, be¬ fore the juices turn quite putrid. But the progrefs towards a putrid flate is in proportion to that ten¬ dency ; therefore a fever is called Putrid, which is owing to more active caufes than mere inflamma¬ tion, viz. to obflrublions of the vifcera, of the fkin, of the capillary veffels, and, by confequence, to a peculiar and adtive acrimony: for violent exercife, checked perfpiration, or crapula, where there is nothing more material, produces an Ephemera, which is cured within the twenty-four hours by < E 2 abflinence.