A treatise on diphtheria : its nature, pathology and homoeopathic treatment / by Wm. Tod Helmuth.

  • William Tod Helmuth
Date:
1862
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A treatise on diphtheria : its nature, pathology and homoeopathic treatment / by Wm. Tod Helmuth. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    sore throat of a dij)litheritic character prevailing at Cremona. A disease, resembling and designated Crou]), appeared at Chesham in Buckinghamshire in 1793 and 1794, which, like the Cornish epidemic forty years earlier, appears to have been really idiopathic diphtheria. In Sweden, an epidemic diphtheria appeared in 1755, where it raged for ten years. It was found in Stockholm in 1757-58; in Rasbo in 1761-62. Dr. Samuel Bard, in a paper entitled An Enquiry into the nature, cause and cure of Angina Suffocativa, or sore throat distemper, published in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society in 1789, describes an epidemic disease, the nature and seat of which lead to the conclusion that it must have been Diphtheria, as it apj)eared in 1771 in Kew York. Grreenhow quotes at length from this, but the limits of this chapter forbid any further mention save the insertion of a small paragraph, viz. : Out of sixteen cases attended with this remarJcahle suffocation in breathing, seven died, live of them before the fifth day, the other two about the eighth. Of those who recovered, the disease was carried off in one by a plentiful saliva- tion, which began on the sixth day ; in most of the others by the expectoration of a viscid mucus. From these facts, it is plainly evident that Diph- theria is anything but a new disease^ and those physicians who state such news to their patients, or their students, are not certainly as well versed in the history of the disorder as they would have either their patrons or their pupils believe.