Selected monographs.

Date:: 1888

Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Selected monographs. Source: Wellcome Collection.

199/440 (page 181)

work, I find recorded in my notes, as among tlae most constant symptoms, excessive intolerance of light (of wMcli I can add my own experience) ; su-ffnsion of tlae eyes to an extent rarely if ever witnessed in typhoid fever; and minute injection of the conjunctival vessels. In not a few cases chemosis, corneitis producing ulceration and onyx, iritis, and in two or three cases Egyptian ophthalmia, occurred in the course of the disease. What, again, are more common in typhus than the glassy eye (considered by Rochoux peculiar to it, from its very rare occurrence in typhoid fever), the immensely dilated and extremely contracted pupil, and even total blindness ? If reminded that, in adducing those facts, I am proving the identity of the two diseases, I reply, that if to prove the existence of analogies is to prove identity, there is an end to all conclusive reasoning and accurate knowledge. In order to establish fi'om analogy the identity of any two diseases, the resemblances must be so numerous, so striking, and, above all, so important, and the differences so few, so trifling, and so easily accounted for, as to warrant the overlooking^of the latter conditions, which have certainly not as yet been answered in the case before us. I. I have now to consider symptoms that have a material bearing on the decision of this important question. The state of the abdomen and bowels during life is naturally regarded as worthy of particular attention. The common use of purgatives in Great Britain throughout the course of typhus, and their well-known beneficial effects, while they render the declaration of Montault (p. 93), that Hamilton's method still counts some partisans in England, not a little amusing, and passing strange, the sweeping con- demnation pronounced against their repeated administration by Gauthier de Claubry (p. 156-172), prove at the same time the existence of certain symptoms to be combated. Though not called upon here to undertake a defence of the English mode of practice as applicable in all cases of typhus, I refer to it as furnishing some very remarkable facts bearing on the question at issue. Dr. West, in his able paper on Exanthematic Typhus (in the fiftieth volume of the ' Edin. Med. and Surg. JournaP), makes the following observations The action of the bowels was not disturbed in the great