A treatise on the continued fevers of Great Britain / by Charles Murchison.

Date:
1884
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A treatise on the continued fevers of Great Britain / by Charles Murchison. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    do on causes, which to a great extent are under human control, their study is of special import to the military commander, to whom a healthy army is one of the most essential conditions of victory; to the medical jurist, who ought to know that limited outbreaks of fever have often been attributed to criminal poisoning; to the statesman engaged in framing laws for the health of the people; to the sanitary reformer, and to the community at large, whose duty and interest it is to avert disease and death. B. Nosological Belations of Continued Fevers. Continued Fevers have been classed by medical writers of all ages as distinct, on the one hand from the Eruptive, and on the other from the Intermittent and Eemittent Fevers. But, although this classification may be in some respects convenient, the distinction is on both sides arbitrary. Some of the con- tinued fevers agree with the eruptive in being eminently contagious, in rarely attacking an individual more than once, and in being characterised by the presence of a peculiar eruption on the skin; while, on the other hand, one of them (simple fever) is not at all contagious; another (enteric) is but slightly so; in two (relapsing and simple fever), one attack confers no immunity from subsequent attacks; in two (relapsing and simple fever), there is no specific eruption; one of them (enteric) usually assumes a remittent type, so as to resemble malarious remittent fever ; and all of them may be said to agree with the malarious fevers, but to differ from the eruptive, in arising from preventable causes, or in being capable of spontaneous or independent generation. Hence the diseases known as ' Continued Fevers' constitute a somewhat hetero- geneous class, and may be said to occupy an intermediate position between the eruptive and malarious fevers. C. Plurality op Continued Fevers. Many of the early writers on medicine, such as Biverius, Willis, Hoffmann, Strother, Huxham, Pringle, and Macbride, recognised and described different forms of Continued Fever ; but their investigations did not suffice to establish absolutely the specific non-identity of the diseases which they observed. During the last thirty years, no subject has occupied more the attention of the profession, or created greater discussion, than
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