A memoir on contagion, more especially as it respects the yellow fever : read in convention of the Medical and Chirurgical Faculty of Maryland, on the 3d of June, 1817 / by Nathaniel Potter, M.D.
- Nathaniel Potter
- Date:
- 1818
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: A memoir on contagion, more especially as it respects the yellow fever : read in convention of the Medical and Chirurgical Faculty of Maryland, on the 3d of June, 1817 / by Nathaniel Potter, M.D. 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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![without disguise, susceptible of but one interpretation. The tout ensemble of his faithful picture, portrays the disease in colours as glowing as those of Chisholin or Rush. He enu- merates the more prominent symptoms, under the fol- lowing appellations: xawo$, the ardent fever; rvtpos, a stupor or coma; fytuns, an inflammation of the brain or its investing membranes; <x™?w> a yellowness of the skin, and caps the climax of the malignant picture by the words ^eXocvx epAv, black vomit, and tukww */*&»> the vomiting of black matter. Jji burning fevers, says Hippocrates, a yellowness of the skin on the fifth day, especially accompanied by a singultus, is a sign of great malignity.* In the first section of his first book, on prognosis, he states in the most explicit terms that the black vomit is a most dangerous symptom.] He ranks the disease to which he attaches these pathogno- monick signs among the endemicks of Greece, and on this, as well as all other occasions, attributes its origin to the uncommon heat of the seasons. It would be su- perfluous to adduce other proofs, (with which his works abound,) for the most fastidious nosologist cannot improve upon his emphatical definitions. The visionary idea of an exotic origin, never entered his imagination. He does not invidiously impute the pestilential visitation to other na- tions; he does not stigmatize the Phoenicians with having introduced it by commercial intercourse, nor does he insi- nuate that it was introduced through the Bosphorus or im- ported from the islands of the Archipelago. As no well marked distinction between miasmatick and other epidemicks was taken till it was suggested by Lancisr, we will only recur to more ancient authorities, when we come to examine the doctrine of contagion with a view to its pathology. He bears strong witness in our favour, in his * Ey toiti xavo-oiciv ixv vntyirriTxi tv.kfos xat Xvj-y mtyijilaiu eovn* $ayx~ tZoss vwjspotyxi Xa/x.tavovTa«. j Sect. 9th Book on Crisoe.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21148156_0014.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
