Observations on morbid poisions, chronic and acute. The first comprehending syphilis, yaws, sivvens, elephantiasis, and the anomala confounded with them. The second and acute contagions, particularly the variolous and vaccine / [Joseph Adams].

Joseph Adams

Date:: 1807

Credit: Observations on morbid poisions, chronic and acute. The first comprehending syphilis, yaws, sivvens, elephantiasis, and the anomala confounded with them. The second and acute contagions, particularly the variolous and vaccine / [Joseph Adams]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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$- © js the conversion of one compound into another, by a new ar- rangement, or manner of combination ef iis: elements. The fer- mentation {of digestion] is peculiar to the organs. of digestion, and has never been produced by any artificial means.’*; Here we see the danger of trusting to definition in physiological researches, and I shall. now attempt to illustrate, by a well ‘known, fact, Bacon’s objection to the syilogism ; his observation, that it is necessary to recur to certain facts, their series and order; to reason by such induction as: will meet every objection; that, the foundation of science: is to trace that raw by which simple, individual actions take place in individual bodies; and that when that law is dis- covered, we shall have no difficulty in accounting for any variety of rorMs which sometimes present themselves. The dispute concerning hernia congenita is familiar to every one. Let us then trace thé history of it in a manner’no one can object to. Dr. Hunter, and probably other anatomists, before the enquity was instituted, saw the testicles within the abdomen-of a fetus. This was one of those facts: which, as the discoverer neither communicated nor enquired further into, might be said to amount to nothing, and the subject might have passed for a monstrous, production... Mr. Sharp, after this, acquaints Dr. Hunter, that he had seen in an old rupture the testicle in contact with the gut. Here was.an important fact, and the moreso, as it was suey Ah Had such been the case with Dr. Hunter's, Mr. Sharp might have. pursued. his enquiry into the cause of the rupture he met with, and the whole difficulty might have been solved. About this time appeared Baron Haller’s Opuscula Pathologica, in which he gives a case of hernia congentta, shows that the testicles are orignally formed in_ the _* In the Essay on Digestion, published some years afterwards, Dr. Fordyce drops the term fermentation, and uses only the definition. In this essay, also, instead of considering the blood (see his Practice of Physic) as constantly tending to putrefaction, which it is only kept from by its motion in the vessels, he admits the probability of its life. d$