Clinical lectures on typhus and continued fever / by Charles Ritchie.

  • Ritchie, Charles.
Date:
[1854-1855]
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Clinical lectures on typhus and continued fever / by Charles Ritchie. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    11/64 (page 139)
    GLASGOW MEDICAL JOURNAL. Vol. II.] OCTOBER, 1854. [No. 7. ORIGINAL COMMUNICATIONS. I. Clinical Lectures on Typhus and Continued Fever. By Charles Ritchie, M.D., one of the Physicians of the Royal Infirmary, Glasgow. Lecture II. (Continued from page 138>) III. I have, in last lecture, alluded to the agitation by the pro¬ fession of the question, whether Typhus and Typhoid fever are of common origin, as a third inducement with me to consider the subject here, and I have referred to the conflicting views enter¬ tained of the etiology and treatment of fever in general, as sup¬ plying a cogent a priori argument against this supposition. I would now, in opening up the nature and grounds of this dispute, seek to indicate the independent and intrinsically distinct consti¬ tution of the two diseases, by considerations of another descrip¬ tion. 1. In one of the works ascribed to Hippocrates, (De Ratione Victus in Morbis Acutis Liber: Sect. IV. p. 68,) there is the description of a fever characterized by anxiety, meteorism of bowels, jactitation, sense of weight and pain in the head, tendency to faint, loss of speech, hiccup, trembling of the hands, and death about the twelfth day, or a favourable crisis on the fourteenth day. This assemblage of symptoms is distinct from that of any other form referred to in the same writings, and has a strong resemblance in itself to the habits of typhus. Again, in the first book De Morbis Vulgaribus, (Sect. I. p. 14,) he says, that towards the end of summer and during the autumn, there were many cases of mild continued fever, which were protracted to the twentieth, sometimes to the fortieth, and at others to the eightieth day, the principal symptoms being some diarrhoea, slight cough, and a succession of remissions, with little mortality. This appears to me to have been mild enteric fever. In the following year (Sect. II. p. 18) a more severe form of the