A system of practical medicine. By American authors. Vol. 2 : $b General diseases (continued) and diseases of the digestive system
Science
A system of practical medicine. By American authors. Vol. 2 : $b General diseases (continued) and diseases of the digestive system
Medicine -- Practice
Whatever differences of opinion may obtain as to the value of cold in
the treatment of the hyperthermia of typhoid fever, there is a
tolerable consensus of opinion that it is our most reliable and
promptest resource in those formidable cases of rheumatic fever
attended with hyperpyrexia, both when alarming delirium and coma
coexist and when they are absent.[208] Space will not allow of details
here in the employment of cold to reduce hyperpyrexia--a subject
discussed elsewhere in this work. Suffice it to say, that besides the
cold bath (70° or 60°) which the committee regards as the most certain,
the tepid bath (96° to 86°) is employed by Fox and regarded as the best
by Andrews; it may be cooled down to 70° by adding ice or cold water to
it (Ziemssen). The cold wet sheet-pack is still thought much of, like
the last, in old and feeble people. Kibbie's method deserves more
attention than it has received. He pours tepid water (95° to 80°) over
the patient's body, covered from the axillæ to the thighs with a wet
sheet and laid upon a cot, through the open canvas of which the water
passes and is caught on a rubber cloth beneath the cot, and conveyed
into a bucket at the foot of the bed.
[Footnote 208: The powerful depressing effects of high temperature on
the human body, and the remarkable opposite influences of a cool
temperature, have been personally experienced by the writer in the last
three days. For two or three days the weather has been very hot, and he
has experienced the usual feeling of exhaustion, incapacity for thought
and action. After a thunderstorm last evening the temperature fell 25°,
and this morning, twelve hours later, he feels vigorous, refreshed, and
capable of intellectual and physical labor. The change is remarkable.]
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