Essays on the puerperal fever and other diseases peculiar to women : Selected from the writings of British authors previous to the close of the eighteenth century / Edited by Fleetwood Churchill.

  • Fleetwood Churchill
Date:
1850
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Essays on the puerperal fever and other diseases peculiar to women : Selected from the writings of British authors previous to the close of the eighteenth century / Edited by Fleetwood Churchill. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    A TREATISE ON THE PUERPERAL FEVER BY DR. HULME.1 PREFACE. The Puerperal Fever is a disease peculiar to lying-in women. The term puerperal is derived from the Latin word puerperus, and, strictly speaking, signifies no more than childbed; but as this is the most dangerous of all childbed fevers, some writers, by way of eminence, have properly called it the puerperal fever, to distinguish it from the milk fever, or any other incident to women after delivery. Notwithstanding this disease hath been common to lying-in women in all ages, and in all climates, and even been described in the works of the first writer on the art of healing,2 yet being generally looked upon rather as a symptom or consequence of some other disease, than a disease itself, it hath been either entirely overlooked, or only superficially described by the the generality of medical writers, inso- much that we have scarcely had a determinate name by which to distinguish it. Most authors have termed it an obstruction or sup- pression of the lochia; others, an inflammation of the uterus; some have called it, the lochial fever; some, after-pains; and, in the northern parts of Great Britain, it is said to be named the weed. But I am clearly of opinion that the puerperal fever is as much an original or primary disease as the ague, quinsy, pleurisy, or any other complaint incident to the human body. Physicians have so greatly differed, likewise, concerning the nature, cause, and treatment of the puerperal fever, that it remaineth to the present time a sub- ject of much dispute. And what is of more fatal consequence than may at first be imagined, is the ignorance of people in general, and particularly of lying-in women and their attendants, respecting this disease, which causes them either to neglect it, or to mistake it for after- pains, or some colic complaint; and to this I ascribe, in some mea- 1 [A Treatise on the Puerperal Fever, &c. By Nathaniel Hulme, M.D., Physician in Ordinary to the City of London Lying-in Hospital, &c, 1772.] a Hippocrates. 5
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