A treatise on the venereal disease / by John Hunter ; with copious additions, by Philip Ricord ; translated and edited, with notes, by Freeman J. Bumstead.

  • John Hunter
Date:
1859
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A treatise on the venereal disease / by John Hunter ; with copious additions, by Philip Ricord ; translated and edited, with notes, by Freeman J. Bumstead. 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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    syphilis, is generally admitted; and is even regarded as peculiar to these affections. But experimental inoculation does not permit us to admit incubation of the primary ulcers of syphilis. There is not, as has been asserted, a .time intervening between the application of the cause and its first effects. The moment that the virus is deposited in the tissues under the necessary conditions for contagion to take place, its action begins and produces its phenomena with a more or less rapid evolution. In a word—as any one may convince himself by artificially inoculating a chancre—there is no more incubation after the insertion of virulent pus, under the epidermis, than after a thorn planted in the flesh; and a chancre is produced in the first case by a gradual process, just as an abscess is formed in the second, after the necessary time for suppuration. No bronchitis, pneumonia, or phleg- mon arrives at the suppurative period, immediately after the action of its exciting cause. Since gonorrhoea may be due to other causes than sexual intercourse, we should give but little weight to observations, selected to prove the existence of a period of incubation, in which the disease appears a very long time after the suspected sexual act. There are some patients, such as Hunter himself observed, more commonly women, who, a short time after exposure, experience the premonitory symptoms of gonorrhoea. Their organs are red, hot, and swollen ; the natural secretion of the parts may dry up, as in the cases which Fabre called dry gonorrhoea, or it may increase; and yet, with- out any pus being formed, the disease stops entirely, and often suddenly, and does not return.—Eicord.] § 2. Of the Difficulty of Distinguishing the Virulent from the Simple Gonorrhoea. The surface of the urethra is subject to inflammation and suppura- tion from various other causes besides the venereal poison; and some- times discharges happen spontaneously when no immediate cause can be assigned. Such may be called simple gonorrhoeas, having nothing of the venereal infection in them ; though those persons that have been formerly subject to virulent gonorrhoeas are most liable to them. It is given as a distinguishing mark between the simple and the virulent gonorrhoea that the simple comes on immediately after copulation, and is at once violent; whereas the virulent comes on some days after, and gradually. But the simple is not in all cases a consequence of a man's having had connection with women; it does not always come on at once, nor is it always free from pain. On the other hand, we see many venereal gonorrhoeas that begin without any appearance of inflamma- tion, and I have been very much at a loss to determine whether they were venereal or not; for there is a certain class of symptoms common to almost all diseases of the urethra, from which it is difficult to dis- tinguish the few that arise solely from the specific affection. I have known the urethra sympathize with the cutting of a tooth,1 producing 1 Natural History of the Teeth, Part II. p. 110.