Correspondence and editorial comments on the points at issue between Dr. Tweedie & Dr. Murchison concerning identical passages in their respective works on fever.

  • Charles Murchison
Date:
1863
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Correspondence and editorial comments on the points at issue between Dr. Tweedie & Dr. Murchison concerning identical passages in their respective works on fever. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    great—point is the eruption, of which a specific form is presented in each kind of fever—the typhus and the enteric. On this point —the exanthematic nature of typhus—Dr. Murchison, we may state by anticipation, remarks, without apparently giving a positive opinion of his own, that the matter has been much de- bated ; and that a place for typhus among exanthematous fevers has been claimed by Hildenbrand, Koupell, and Peebles. The evidence in favour of placing typhus at least among the eruptive fevers appears to us to be certainly very strong. We must arrest at this point our notice of Dr. Tweedie’s work; and it is scarcely necessary to examine it more fully, as the lectures of which it consists have already been laid before the profession in the pages of a contemporary. It may, however, be necessary to refer to them again in noticing the elaborate volume of Dr. Murchison. We therefore dismiss Dr. Tweedie for the present, with the remark that he has given a very readable and instructive account, for purposes of immediately practical importance, of the symptomatology, diagnosis, pathology, and treatment of the con- tinued fevers of this country. We cannot but regret that, in the production of so able and useful a work, he should have allowed himself to be drawn into the commission of an error so grave as that on which we have found it necessary to offer remarks in the early portion of this article ; but, with this exception, and with the caution necessarily arising therefrom to readers of the book to con- sider whose labours they are in certain parts really studying, we must give Dr. Tweedie his full share of credit for coming forward as a convert to and able exponent of those views which modern pathology and practice point to as being correct. [To be continued.'] V. LETTER FROM DR. TWEEDIE TO EDITOR OF “BRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL,” PUBLISHED DECEMBER 27tH, 1862, WITH REMARKS BY THE EDITOR. Sir,—The remarks of the reviewer of my Lectures on Fevers, in the last number of the British Medical Journal, render an explanation on my part imperative; and I feel satisfied that, when I have made my statement, my medical brethren will not feel dis- posed to endorse the charge of plagiarism brought against me. Let me state, then, in the first place, that six years ago, when I acceded to the request of the President to deliver a course of lectures at the College of Physicians on the Pathology of Fevers, I determined to avail myself of the ample store of facts recorded in the register of cases kept with great accuracy at the Fever Hospital. This, as one of the attending physicians, I had a right to do; but, in sketching for myself the statistical information I