Observations on the changes of the air, and the concomitant epidemical diseases in the island of Barbadoes : to which is added, A treatise on the putrid bilious fever, commonly called the yellow fever, and such other diseases as are indigenous or endemial in the West India islands, or in the torrid zone / by William Hillary, M.D. with notes by Benjamin Rush, M.D.

William Hillary

Date:: 1811..

Credit: Observations on the changes of the air, and the concomitant epidemical diseases in the island of Barbadoes : to which is added, A treatise on the putrid bilious fever, commonly called the yellow fever, and such other diseases as are indigenous or endemial in the West India islands, or in the torrid zone / by William Hillary, M.D. with notes by Benjamin Rush, M.D. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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ference between a patient who has strong, rigid, and elastic solids, and a dense blood ; and one who has a de- licate, slender, or a relaxed weak state of his solids, and a lax, loose, unconnected state of the globules of his blood ; nor the difference between one who has a viscid, sizy, or buff like blood, from one who has a lax, putrescent, dis- solved state of blood ; for all these different constitutions may possibly have the same epidemical disease, at the same time, but with different symptoms, and may require different methods of cure, both as to the quantity of bleeding and other evacuations, as well as different medi- cines, though it be the same disease, and arises from the same epidemical cause ; as every judicious physician knows. But I mean such changes in diseases, as arise from the variations in the weather, and either produce different symptoms in the same disease, or such as may determine the morbid matter to a different part of the body; or lastly, to be carried off by a different critical discharge, than it was before ; all which should be care- fully observed by the attending physician, and nature should always be assisted by him, to effect such ways and methods as she indicates and endeavours to do, if it can be done; these I have endeavoured to observe : as also when those changes in the weather have either put an end to the then reigning epidemical diseases, or have produced some other diseases which did not appear before; and when these changes were any way consider- able, or of any importance, I have taken care to mention them, as well as such changes in the methods of cure, or in the medicines, as I found necessary to be made, es- pecially those which T found to be the most successful.

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