A Treatise on the Plague and Yellow Fever: With an Appendix, containing histories of the plague at Athens in the time of the Peloponnesian War; at Constantinople in the time of Justinian; at London in 1665; at Marseilles in 1720Tytler, James
History
A Treatise on the Plague and Yellow Fever: With an Appendix, containing histories of the plague at Athens in the time of the Peloponnesian War; at Constantinople in the time of Justinian; at London in 1665; at Marseilles in 1720
Tytler, James
Plague -- Early works to 1800; Yellow fever -- Early works to 1800
be given; as, after the disease became general, physicians did not
choose to feel the pulses of their patients but through a glove or
tobacco-leaf. Worms called _teretes_ were frequently discharged both
upwards and downwards. Women with child generally suffered abortion,
and were carried off by an uterine hæmorrhage.[107]
[107] Bonetus relates, that in 1676 in a malignant fever at Borgo di
Safia, the patients discharged live worms by the mouth, and adds that
they were sooner killed by wine than any thing.
According to Sydenham, the plague begins with chilliness and shivering,
like the fit of an intermittent, succeeded in a little time by violent
vomiting and oppression at the breast, accompanied with its common
symptoms. These continue till the disease proves mortal, or the
kindly eruption of a bubo or parotis discharges the morbific matter.
Sometimes, though rarely, the disease is not preceded by any fever;
the purple spots, which denote immediate death, coming out even while
persons are abroad about their business. But this hardly ever happens
but in the beginning of a very fatal plague, and never while it is on
the decline, or in those years in which it is not epidemic. Sometimes
swellings appear without having been preceded either by a fever or
any other considerable symptom; but he conceives that some slight and
obscure shivering always precedes the seizure.
Mariti, in his travels through Cyprus, &c. says that the plague of 1760
began with loss of appetite, pain in the shoulders, head-ach extremely
violent, delirium, vomiting, with a most excruciating pain in that
part where the tumour by which the plague is characterised, is about
to break forth. Death often took place on the third day, and very few
lived beyond the thirteenth.
The Abbe’s definition of what he calls the plague, and which seems to
be the _pestilential bubo_ of the physicians, is somewhat singular.
“The plague (says he) is an oblong tumour, shaped like a pumpkin, which
is at first of a flesh colour; but it gradually becomes red, and at
length blueish; and this is a sign that the disease is incurable. If it
continues red, and a little after inclines to yellow, it is a sign that
a suppuration will take place: the swelling is then opened, and the
patient is sometimes cured.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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