Report ... on the Asiatic cholera, together with a report of the City Physician on the Cholera Hospital.

  • Committee of Internal Health (Boston, Mass.)
Date:
1849
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Report ... on the Asiatic cholera, together with a report of the City Physician on the Cholera Hospital. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    42/194 (page 38)
    In the Report of a Committee to the French Academy of Medicine, made July, 1831, it is stated that “The profound study of a great number of statements of post mortem examinations leads to the following results: I. The pathological changes found after death by Cholera are slight, variable, different, and even opposite. II. In a stated system of organs, these lesions have no fixed seat, and still less a determinate character. III. In a great number of cases the most exact ob- servers state that no important alteration has been found.” So also in Scoutteten’s History of the Cholera, (Bos- ton, 1832,) page 27, it is said that “numerous post mortem examinations have revealed to M. Gravier a violent inflammation of the oesophagus and inner mem- brane of the stomachwhile no fact is more complete- ly established by other observations, made in this City and elsewhere, than that there are, as a general rule, no constant traces of inflammatory action visible any- where. It is notorious, that redness of the intestinal canal, though unaccompanied by any other alteration, is often reported as “ inflammation.” The experiments of M. Magendie, with regard to this point, were repeat- ed by M. Contour at Moscow in 1848. “ Like the learned French physiologist, he saw, in injecting water into one of the gastro-epiploic arteries, the blood give place to the injected fluid, and the redness of the mu- cous membrane disappear; a proof that it was caused simply by a sanguineous stagnation by congestion, and not by vascular obliteration from inflammation.” (Tar- dieu, Bigelow’s Translation, page 36.) Some of these discrepancies, no doubt, are owing to hasty or inaccurate observation. Others may be ex- ]dained, by the rapidity and violence of a disease, in which death often ensues before any marked alteration can be