Selected monographs.

Date:: 1888

Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Selected monographs. Source: Wellcome Collection.

228/440 (page 210)

have been tlie state of the intestines in the army epidemics referred to ? Is it not rather highly probable that, where everything indicated a deeply altered and corrupted state of the blood, and local gangrene was of frequent occurrence, the gut as alleged by all the observers cited, may have been actually sphacelated? All that. I have in view in these remarks is to demonstrate that, even were the existence of such lesions proved beyond a doubt, the alteration of the glands of Peyer, and the isolated follicles, now called charac- teristic, is very far from being proved thereby. But are there no facts that bear against the reasonings of the French essayist? On the contrary, there are many. Lombard has graphically described his surprise on finding no lesions whatever in several cases he saw inspected while in Scotland and Ireland. We have seen the supposition Gauthier de Claubry has recourse to in order to explain away his testimony; and, even granting that the circumstances of misery and exhaustion, in which, according to him, the people of Scotland are placed, do, as he supposes, produce a strong resemblance in the prevailing fever to army typhus (p. 143), does he advance one step towards a removal of the difficulty by gaining such an admission? Nay, rather, if M. Grauthier de Claubry has made out his position, that the intestinal lesion is present in typhus as well as in typhoid fever, whence this allusion to army typhus to explain the want of intestinal lesion—an allusion by which he demoHshes the structure his work was intended to raise, and unwittingly discloses his own distrust in his own opinions? Again, M. Delbosc (cited at p. 38), in his account of the epidemic at Alby in 1823, mentions only a rosy colour of the peritoneal tunic,'' and M. Keraudren and the Toulon physicians, though their attention was specially directed to that point by the questions addressed to them by the Academy of Medicine, ' never observed any intestinal lesion in the typhous epidemic at Toulon in 1829-30. I have already referred to Dr. Tweedie's data, and have cited M. Dalmas's silence as im- partial evidence, though in the United Kingdom very few require evidence to convince them, that in Dublm, as else- where, a form of fever exists, of highly malignant character, 1 Chomel, p. 338.