Outlines of the chief camp diseases of the United States armies as observed during the present war : a practical contribution to military medicine / by Joseph Janvier Woodward.

  • Joseph Janvier Woodward
Date:
1863
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Outlines of the chief camp diseases of the United States armies as observed during the present war : a practical contribution to military medicine / by Joseph Janvier Woodward. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    tures, from which many thousands of American med- ical men derived their first impressions, and by his treatise on the Practice of Medicine, which has been perhaps more extensively read in this country than any other work on the same subject, has ex- ercised the largest influence over the American med- ical mind. In the work referred to, as well as in his lectures, Dr. Wood limits the use of the term mias- matic diseases exclusively to affections due to paludal exhalations, or marsh miasms, and objects to includ- ing, under the designation miasmatic, affections caused by emanations of any kind arising from the human body, giving as his reason that there is no such re- lation between the two morbid causes as to render their association in one category desirable. (Woods Practice of Medicine, 5th edition, vol. i. page 157.) But, however true this statement may have ap- peared from the facts presented in private practice and in civil hospitals, the tendency of observations made during the present war upon the vast multi- tudes of patients suffering from diseases arising from these two sources, is to lead to a very different con- clusion. In fact, the typhoid diseases, which may be regarded as the type products >of the idio-miasmata, and the autumnal fevers, which may be looked upon as the type products of the koino-miasmata, are found complicating each other in the most various manners, and producing in patients, with constitutions impaired by camp diet (scorbutic tendency), mixed forms of disease, differing in important particulars from those with which our physicians had become acquainted in civil practice. This mutual combined action would afford o-00d