Observations on the powers and effects of cold as a cause of disease ; with some remarks on the best means of preventing its morbid effects, etc / [John Clendinning].

  • Clendinning, J. (John), 1798-1848.
Date:
1830?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Observations on the powers and effects of cold as a cause of disease ; with some remarks on the best means of preventing its morbid effects, etc / [John Clendinning]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    OBSERVATIONS ON THE POWERS AND EFFECTS OF COLD AS A CAUSE OF DISEASE; WITH SOME REMARKS ON THE BEST MEANS OF PREVENTING ITS MORBID EFFECTS, &c. BY JOHN CLENDINNING, M.D. Of Edinburgh and Oxford; Fellow and Censor of the Royal College of Physicians of London; and Physician to the Western Dispensary. [FKOM THE LONDON MEDICAL AND PHYSICAL JOURNAL.] There is no one of the causes of disease which, in popular estimation, is so extensively mischievous as cold. Febrile, inflammatory, almost universally, and in numberless instances nervous, cachectic, and other forms of disease, are laid to the charge of that agent; and the popular opinion has un¬ questionably a foundation in truth, and is to a great extent confirmed by daily professional experience. A very large portion of the mortality of all climates is attributable to changes of atmospherical heat and humidity, and this in a double sense; much disease is occasioned by hourly and daily fluctuations of the thermometer and hygrometer at all sea¬ sons ; while a still greater destruction of human life is found to depend on the change from the soft airs of summer to the chilling blasts of winter and spring. “Half of mankind,” says Ritter, “perish before the close of the third year.”— “If, on the one hand,” says the same writer, in the article Ausdunstung of Ersch and Gruber’s Encyclopaedia, “we recollect the susceptibility of the teguments and the frailty of the incompletely formed organs, and, on the other hand, the numberless occasions of taking cold, from baptism for¬ ward to the time when the child can wallow in the puddle, and sit down to cool itself in the blast, we shall soon cease to wonder at the amount of infant mortality from cold.”—“The B