Practical remarks on yellow fever : having special reference to the treatment / by Edward Jenner Coxe.

  • Edward Jenner Coxe
Date:
1859
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Practical remarks on yellow fever : having special reference to the treatment / by Edward Jenner Coxe. 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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    Sensible perspiration thus becomes insensible, passing off, unseen, in vapor. Dry garments, and warm, dry, free air, may lessen apparent, not real perspiration. The fundamental idea, in the popular mind, that sweat and wet, perspiration and water, are synonymous terms, is a fallacy, which the medical profession should not countenance. The artificial application of heat may increase sensible perspiration; but the hot, forced sweat, thus excited, as it is sometimes in yellow fever, [almost invariably, E. J. C.,] which, in the early stage, is one of the hottest diseases known, is generally mis- chievous, often resembling that malignant form of yellow fever, in which the patient, from the first hour of his disease, until his death, is bathed in a hot per- spiration, the heat declining but little, even in articulo mortis. For, although the general tendency of perspiration be refrigerattry and curative in yellow fever, yet heating measures to excite it during the hot stage of the disease, augments the danger upon the whole. The forced sweating not neutral- ising the new element of mischief, introduced and com- bined with the preexisting preternatural temperature inherent in the malady itself. In these persistent hot cases of yellow fever, nature generally sets up the sweating and evaporating process, which is favored upon physical principles, by free ventilation in warm, dry, lively currents of air, unless the body be almost hermetically sealed in blankets, non-conductors of heat. Among the most efficacious of all remedies for the treatment of the early and middle stages of ardent fevers, are, free aerial currents, and cold water. The ap- plication of these remedies, of course, requires skill and discrimination, yet owing to their cheapness, simplicity, pleasantness, to prejudice or some other cause, they are