Illustrations of the atmospherical origin of epidemic diseases, and of its relation to their predisponent constitutional causes : and on the twofold means of prevention, mitigation, and cure, and of the powerful influence of change of air as a prinicpal remedy / by T. Forster.

  • Forster, T. (Thomas), 1789-1860.
Date:
1829
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Illustrations of the atmospherical origin of epidemic diseases, and of its relation to their predisponent constitutional causes : and on the twofold means of prevention, mitigation, and cure, and of the powerful influence of change of air as a prinicpal remedy / by T. Forster. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

    116/230 (page 104)
    1^4 in proportion as different parts of that canal, witli whidi the sympathy exists, may be affected by disease. Such a view of the subject as this will also account for the progressive relief afforded to a concferies of local disorders, by the successive operation of different cathartics, which had a known action on different portions of the alimentary canal. By a close examination of what parts of the digestive apparatus are affected, we may be therefore directed in our medical practice. When the liver is the seat of morbid action, the mind seems to suffer from melancholy, as I have otherwhere said is the result : we then employ repeated mild mercurials ;—and so on of other organs. Spigelius, under an idea that the determinate in- flammations of the intestines, in some epidemics, led to ulcerations of the intestinal coat, used to try to cut off its malignity by bleeding in the early stages. Morgagni noticed also destructive ulcerations in cases of fever, which he discovered by post mortem examinations. But though the whole history of epidemics shows their specific action on different tissues and organs of the body, yet the nature of the cause remains a mystery. I have plenty of facts before me to show that electricity is much concerned as a cause, but whether simply, or with what compound aids, remains as yet undiscovered. The periodical fever of the small intestines arresting digestion and producing by sympathy the nervous headache, described before, which occurs at chang-es to east wind, and often near to the lunar periods, or before storms, is one instance of specific and determined action, as purely electric as any I know of ; but even here it is impossible to say what particular morbific poisons this wind might have gathered up and modified by its electricity. Another important fact in epidemics is, that when an epidemical state of the air is once set up, it seems to have, in certain places where its attacks happen, a sort of pro- gressive malignity and crisis, which some writers have imagined to be referrible to a continuance of the same irritation on the body, rather than to an augmented