On the local origin of the yellow fever epidemic of British Guiana / in a letter from Daniel Blair to John Davy, with appended documents.
- Blair, Daniel.
- Date:
- [1851?]
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: On the local origin of the yellow fever epidemic of British Guiana / in a letter from Daniel Blair to John Davy, with appended documents. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.
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![cinchonized. Believing the fever kept up by bronchitic inflam mation, I prescribed small doses of calomel and antiraonial powder ; the total amount of the former being four grains, and of the latter twelve grains. But the fever continued all Sunday and last night, and this morning I found it higher than ever. Still expecting it to subside, there having been free purgation during the night, and the skin, although burning hot, showing some moisture here and there, I left him without prescribing medicine. At half-past 1 o'clock I returned, found him lying on the sofa, as I had directed, his face and foi'ehead deeply flushed, his eyes much injected, his pulse rapid, his skin burning hot, though moist; his tongue covered with a thick grey coating, but brown and dry at tip ; no local pain complained of, no headache, even on shaking the head; no irritability of stomach. Ex- cept the injection of the eyes, there was no symptom in the slightest degree suspicious of yellow fever. I thought of bleeding him, to re- lieve the great vascular engorgement, but feared its after eflfects, and prescribed the twenty grains of calomel with twenty-four of quinine. At my visit this morning, I had the gratification to find a state of' perfect apyrexia.* So much again for the resolvent effect of that combination on fever. I think that this case of intermittent fever, protracting its hot stage, so as to be of a continued type, was modified and exasperated by the previous course of cod-liver oil, but which he will resume when convalescent from the fever. I see in the September number of the Pharmaceutical Journal, a paper by Dr. Pereira, in which he speaks very disparagingly of musk as a medicine. I need only remark, that with it, as with every medicine I enumerated in the yellow fever Materia Me- dica, I have seen its unequivocally beneficial effects over and over ■ again. I don't know what chemists would say of it, but it seemed. to invigorate and cheer, as if it had been a concentration of beef- tea. While at the Government Secretary's office, the other day, making sure that it contained no reports from Dr. Fraser on the: importation-origin of our last epidemic, a conversation occurred! between Mr. Austin, the assistant-secretary, Mi\ Bent, secretary to ' the chief-justice, and myself. As for my brother Hugh, said ]Mr. Austin spontaneously, and rather inconsequentially with the particular • point of conversation, he dated his recovery from his first dose of musk. His brother was Mr. Austin, who was ill in the archdeacon's family, and his case proceeded on to the snuff-like and clay-deposit vomit, at which stage the musk was prescribed. * In a postscript of later date, it is mentioned, that his convalescence took place immediately, and without relapse.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22287978_0014.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
