An inaugural dissertation on pulmonary consumption.

  • Edward Delafield
Date:
1816
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An inaugural dissertation on pulmonary consumption. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    tarrh is so common and generally so easily cured without any consequent ill effects, that it is too apt to be neglected. Many a patient, labouring under incipient Phthisis, has been supposed to be affected by merely a trifling cold, and the only opportunity for curing the disease has been lost. The evil becomes irremediable before it calls ei- ther the attention of the parents, the friends, or even the physician, who has not been familiarly conversant with the fatal consequences of this disease.* Pneumonia is not unfrequently an exciting cause of Phthisis. Like catarrh, its frequent repetition is more dangerous than a single attack. Pneumonia may indeed act merely as a predisposing cause of Consumption, by leaving the lungs in a debilitated and irritable condition, favourable to the production of that disease; but it is an exciting cause, when in consequence of inflammation of the lungs, suppuration follows, and vomica or empyema is the consequence. This shews the close analogy be- tween Phthisis Pulmonalis and ordinary Pneumonia. In the first, the inflammation being seated in the cellular and comparatively insensible portion of the lungs, is slow and gradual, and the consequent suppuration forms in the same manner; while in Pneumonia, the membranous as well as cellular portion of the lungs being involved in the disease, the inflammation is rapid and violent, and must soon ter- minate in either resolution or suppuration. Hence Phthisis Pulmonalis was appropriately called by Dr. Rush a Pncumonicula. No word could more accu- , ■' <= Dr. Hosacb.