Malaria and the causation of intermittent fever / by Henry B. Baker.

  • Baker, Henry B. (Henry Brooks), 1837-1920.
Date:
1890
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Malaria and the causation of intermittent fever / by Henry B. Baker. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    this may be: Excessive perspiration takes out salts, especially sodium chloride, in considerable quantity; the urine passes out salts in considerable quantity. On the other hand the water drank to quench the thirst, does not ordinarily take salts into the blood. (!^cept in cases where common salt is given as a remedy, which is sometimes done by non-professional persons.) According to experiments made many years ago, in the cir- culating blood, in health, the red corpuscles are preserved by sodium chloride from being dissolved in the albumen.“ As this paper is not an ex- haustive treatise on this subject, but is intended to be suggestive to other investigators, I do not now attempt to collate recent evidence,on the changes in the blood. In order, however, to account for the destruction of the red corpuscles, the forma- tion of the pigment, and for the phenomena of intermittent fever, I see no need for the micro- organism which is alleged to be parasitic in the blood, in intermittent fever. It seems tome that all of the phenomena can be accounted for about as well without the parasites as with; but it seems to be a general fact in nature that whenever a highly-organized being commences to break down, there are generally organisms that await the occurrence, and when the breaking down pro- cess is of elements microscopic in size, I believe that microorganisms are generally there. I ac- cept the evidence of the eminent men, who have reported that they are present in the blood in in- termittent fever. But if we grant that malarial fever is caused by microorganisms, parasitic in the blood, it has re- mained to be explained how it is that the micro- organisms only cause intermittent fever under certain conditions of the atmosphere. That in- termittent fever does occur under some conditions, and does not occur under other conditions, has 6 Dalton’s Human Physiology, First Edition, page,s6. Human Physiologj', Flint, Fourth Edition, 1888, page 432.