On metria : and on the dual clinical characteristics of metrial blood-poisoning / by John Thorburn.

  • Thorburn, John, 1834-1885.
Date:
1881
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On metria : and on the dual clinical characteristics of metrial blood-poisoning / by John Thorburn. 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.

    8/22 page 6
    I think I am fairly justified in saying that it is now the almost universal belief of the highest authorities that there is no such disease as puerperal fever in this sense of the term—that it does not, like small-pox, or scarlatina, or other specific fevers, have its own well-defined symptoms and signs, which vary within the narrowest of limits, com- municating itself, and itself alone, to other patients, and communicated only by cases of a strictly similar disease, or by a single proper contagium. No one has been insane enough to propose that this supposed specific fever which is innocuous to the male half of the human race should he sent to our fever hospitals. I have had not a little expe- rience, in consultation, of the cases of so-called puerperal fever occurring in this district, and I have long arrived at the conclusion that it does not exist except as a modification, due to the puerperal state, of many other affections, mostly, though not wholly, of a septic or zymotic character. Time will not allow me to adduce such evidence as I possess, and as many of you may unfortunately accumulate for yourselves by-and-by, that a lying-in woman poisoned by misadventure with the contagium of erysipelas or scarlatina, or inoculated from without with the sepsis from a surgical wound (heterogenesis), or poisoned from within by decom- posing placenta, membranes, or clots (autogenesis), or exposed to the depressing influence of cold or traumatic injury, may, in each case, exhibit every symptom which has been con- sidered as characteristic of puerperal fever. You cannot produce sporadic cases of the other essential fevers in the same multifarious way, I might almost say, at will. In one sense only could I explain or admit the similarity of puerperal fever to the other specific fevers, and it would involve theories which are not yet generally accepted. When the early history of the zymotic diseases has been re-in vesti- gated, and when the facts educed shall have been placed alongside of those which Pasteur and his followers are rapidly accumulating as to the potential variations of zymotic germs, and interpreted in the light of modern evolution, it may turn out, I think it certainly will, that alliances exist between
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image