A History of Epidemics in Britain, Volume 2 (of 2): From the Extinction of Plague to the Present TimeCreighton, Charles
History
A History of Epidemics in Britain, Volume 2 (of 2): From the Extinction of Plague to the Present Time
Creighton, Charles
Epidemics -- Great Britain -- History
Elsewhere he speaks of the frequent relapses as belonging to a
“quartan,” under which diagnosis bark had been tried. The fevers were
less apt to “relapse” when treated by mild cathartics. Another symptom
of this fever was jaundice: “If jaundice breaks forth on the fourth
day of a fever, it is much better than if it comes at the conclusion
of a fever.... Jaundices are now very common after the cure of these
fevers.”
These indications, dispersed throughout the rambling essay of Strother,
point somewhat plainly to relapsing fever[110]. But his theoretical
pathology comes in to obscure the whole matter. He explains everything by
obstructions. The jaundice was due to obstruction of the liver by
“styptics,” the hysteric symptoms to obstructions of the nerves; there
were also theoretical obstructions of the mesentery, part of the matter
being sometimes “thrown off into the mesenteric glands”; also
“congestions” or phlegmons of the liver, spleen and pancreas. But it is
when he comes to the bowels that his subjective morbid anatomy becomes
truly misleading. There is nothing to show that Strother examined a single
body dead of this fever. He says, however, in his _à priori_ way: “The
crisis of these slow fevers is generally deposited on the bowels.... The
lent fever is a symptomatical fever, arising from an inflammation, or an
ulcer fixed on some of the bowels. A lent fever, depending on some fixed
cause of the bowels, must be cured by having regard to those causes some
of which I shall enumerate”:--the first supposition being that the fever
depends on phlegmons by congestion of “the liver, spleen, pancreas, or the
mesentery”; the second, if it depends on extravasations in an equally
comprehensive range of viscera; the third, “if it depends on an ulcer,
then all vulneraries must be administered internally; but to speak truth,
when the viscera are ulcerated, there remains but small hope of life”; the
fourth supposition is worms, the fifth corruption of the humours. All
this is paper pathology. There is not a single precise fact relating to
ulcerated Peyer’s patches, or to swollen mesenteric glands, or to enlarged
spleen, which last would have been equally distinctive of relapsing as of
enteric fever; it is “the viscera” that are ulcerated, or congested, or
extravasated, or it is “some of the bowels,” or the pancreas and liver
obstructed as well as the spleen, the obstruction of the liver being
invoked to explain the highly significant jaundice.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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