Selected monographs.

Date:: 1888

Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Selected monographs. Source: Wellcome Collection.

198/440 (page 180)

muttering delirium, tlie stupor approacliing to coma, the tremor, the subsultus, the carpliology, the rapid, thready, tremulous, and intermittent pulse, of the previous evening, the formidable array of symptoms, in short, which seemed to indicate a speedy and fatal termination, exchanged for the clear eye, the intelligent countenance, the steady hand, the comparatively slow and firm pulse, and the returning appetite of approaching convalescence. To such cases as these we might almost apply the Scripture phrase, At such an hoior, the fever left him; and if the crisis is not very frequently so marked, we can, in the great majority of cases, point with precision at least, to the day on which amendment began to take place. In reply to the question whether this is the case in typhoid fever, I can only adduce my own experience, when I state, that neither in the numerous cases I saw in Scotland, nor in those I have watched in Paris (about a dozen of them very carefully), have I ever seen anything approaching, in the remotest degree, to what I have noticed so frequently in typhus. IV. I proceed to a fourth and very important branch of my subject, viz. the consideration of symptoms. I shall not be tempted, by the highly ingenious and visionary con- clusions drawn by Valleix, from his six cases of typhus, to make any lengthened digression. That author actually considers the absence of headache and affections of the organs of sense as important diagnostic marks of typhus. Instead of wearying the reader with the laboured refutation I had prepared of this strange fancy, I shall merely state, regarding my own cases, that, excluding those in whom the headache ceased before the 5th day, it was present after that period in 98. In between one sixth and one seventh of this number it ceased before the loth day; in the remam- ing five-sixths it continued throughout the advanced stages of the disease, being present in many till the 20th and 25th days • and in 11 throughout the whole course of the affection. Hearing, again, was either more acute, or perverted, or impaired in 69 patients. And finally, while I refer to the almost unanimous testimony of the multitude of distmguished authors cited by Gauthier de Claubry in pp. 5 and 39 ot his 1 ' Arch, de M6d.,' 3me s6rie, t. vi.