Fever physiologically considered; considerations on yellow fever, typhus fever, plague, cholera, and sea-scurvy; also the questions of contagion, and the quarantine laws; with an address to the public, &c. on the popular treatment of cholera / By David M'Connell Reed.
- Reed, David M'Connell, -1889.
- Date:
- 1846
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Fever physiologically considered; considerations on yellow fever, typhus fever, plague, cholera, and sea-scurvy; also the questions of contagion, and the quarantine laws; with an address to the public, &c. on the popular treatment of cholera / By David M'Connell Reed. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![“PREFACE. Xx] tive fevers, in which we actually see a peccant matter, producing general commotion, multiplying itself as a ferment, and at length separated and thrown off at the surface by a direct depuration of the system. So far, therefore, as relates to erup- tive fevers, the opinion ts sufficiently correct. But the moment it is brought forward as the proximate cause of fever, properly so called, in which there is no specific eruption, it completely fails. For, first, no explanation is here given ‘as to the means by which any such concoction, or fer- mentation, or multiplication of morbific matter, in any way takes place. Next, there are many fevers produced evidently by cold, fear, and other excite- ments, as well mental as corporeal, in which, most certainly, there is no morbific matter introduced, ‘and wherein we have no reason to conceive there is any generated internally; while the disease, limited perhaps to a single paroxysm, closes, never- theless, with an evacuation from the skin or the kidneys. And, thirdly, we sometimes behold fevers suddenly cured, as Dr. Cullen has observed, by a hemorrhage so moderate, as, for example, a few drops of blood from the nose, as to be incapable of carrying out any considerable portion of a matter diffused over the whole mass of the blood; while we are equally incapable of conceiving how such diffused morbific matter could collect itself at a](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b33097793_0025.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
