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
Catalogue details

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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    exhaustion; yet not, like the nervous energy of Cullen, under the direction and guidance of a vis conservatriv et medicatriz nature, distinct from the matter of the organization itself, but passively exposed to the effect of such stimuli as it may chance to meet with, and necessarily yielding to their influence. Yi Upon this hypothesis, excitement is the vital flame, excitability the portion of fuel allotted to every man at his birth, and which, varying in every individual, is to serve him without any addition for the whole of his existence: while the stimuli by which we are surrounded, are the different kinds of blasts by which the flame is kept up. Ifthe fuel or excitability be made the most of, by a due tempera- ture or mean rate of blasts or stimuli, the flame or excitement may be maintained for sixty or seventy years. But its power of supporting a protracted flame may be weakened by having the blast either too high or too low. If too high, the fuel or exci- tability will, from the violence of the flame, be destroyed rapidly, and its power of prolonging the flame be weakened directly ; and to this state of the machine Brown gave the name of indirect, or exhausted excitability. Ifthe blasts or stimuli be below the mean rate, the fuel, indeed, will be but little expended, but it will become drier and more inflammable, and its power of prolonging the flame
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