A treatise on relapsing or famine fever / by R.T. Lyons.

  • Lyons, R. T.
Date:
1872
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A treatise on relapsing or famine fever / by R.T. Lyons. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    355/408 (page 339)
    often bring away considerable quantities of black films, like fi-acrments°of dried leaves that had been steeped in water. Before active pni-gatives are taken, in the inflammatory form of remittent, the tongue is usually dry and much loaded with brown or yellowish mucus. Vertigo is often a distressing symptom; and delirium frequently occurs, sometimes even at an early period of the disease. Intense yellowness of the body very frequently takes place m the worst cases (vol. ii., pp. 291-293). He was convinced that these fevers were connected with local congestions, which often run rapidly into inflammation, attended with much interstitial efiusion. The seat of the local congestions is found principally in the stomach, m- testines, c°ellular tissue about the duodenum, and at the root of the meso-colon; the principal disease is also found m the spleen, liver, brain, or lungs. Twining's form of continued fever appears to have com- prised simple and mild relapsing fevers. Intermittent fever included this variety of all the fevers. The chief details omitted by this author are the specifica- tion of the duration of the fever and the relapses. In his description of the variety of relapsing fever called naJcra by the Bengalees, both these omissions are supplied, and the occun-ence of relapses is further mentioned by him in his fugitive writings, as abeady pomted out. Twining per- cefved the resemblance between nahra and the eruptive fever which was epidemic in Calcutta in 1824, and between both these diseases and the disease of North Carolina, which was popularly called pleurisy in the head. Dr. Rush, who described it at the end of his Account of the Bilious Remittent Yellow Fever of 1793 in Philadelphia: 1796, considered the disease to have been an _ evanescent symptom of a bilious remitting fever (vol. ii., p. 394). Twining is silent regarding the contagiousness of the re- mittent fever of the rains. Twining was a firm believer in the efficiency of bleeding and purgation, which latter he called the medical irrita- tion of the bowels, in cuttmg short a fever. He found it apparently successful in the remittent fever of the rains, but unsuccessful in the congestive fever of the cold season.