Lectures and essays on fevers and diphtheria, 1849 to 1879 / by Sir William Jenner.

Date:
1893
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Lectures and essays on fevers and diphtheria, 1849 to 1879 / by Sir William Jenner. 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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    uses cold sponges, opens the windows, allows his patient to lie exposed while the eruption is out, etc. He loses a large proportion of his one hundred cases, and finds, on examina- tion after death, pneumonia in every case. He instantly avers, that the treatment declared by the first to be so advantageous, is most deadly, and forthwith advocates a line of treatment diametrically opposed to that which had proved so efficacious in the first practitioner's hands. The same holds true with respect to continued fever: if three or four diseases are united by one name, and then a line of treatment is stated to be successful in continued fever, with what confidence can we receive the statement ? In the epidemic (of relapsing fever) which visited Edin- burgh in 1817-20, bloodletting was practised in every case, and was supposed to cut short the fever because, soon after the bleeding, the symptoms disappeared; now observation has proved that a disease, presenting all the symptoms noted in that epidemic, will get well in a short time if left to the unaided effort of nature, and that the inference drawn, that it was possible to cut short true typhus fever by bloodletting, was most erroneous, the disease which was then treated by bloodletting being a totally distinct disease from typhus, but confounded with it. One consequence of the supposed success obtained in bloodletting in that epidemic, was the extensive employment of the same remedy in the true typhus, and incalculable loss of life as a result. Bloodletting is practised with advantage in the common continued fever of Paris; in Scotland wine is the mainstay, and bleeding is stated to be most injurious. ' Mere difference in epidemic constitution,' say the advocates of the identity of the disease in those cities. 'Two distinct diseases, requiring different modes of treatment,' say those who regard them in the light in which I am in these papers about to describe them. There cannot remain a doubt on the minds of those who have treated both diseases on a large scale, during the same epidemic constitution and under the same hygienic pecu- liarities, that typhus fever, i.e. the ordinary fever of Edin- burgh, requires wine to be administered, and often largely; while typhoid fever, i.e. the continued fever of Paris, and a very common disease in London, demands wine much less
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