Asiatic Cholera: A treatise on its origin, pathology, treatment, and cureWhitney, Elijah
History
Asiatic Cholera: A treatise on its origin, pathology, treatment, and cure
Whitney, Elijah
Cholera
Such are some of the prominent appearances which the body has presented
when the patient has died in the first, or pulseless stage of the
disease. But in other cases, where the premonitory stage has been
definitely marked, and attended with diarrhoea or other depressing
disorder affecting the alimentary canal, and where the patient has
continued under the influence of the disease for a longer period, and
has passed through the usual successive stages of it, other additional
appearances have been noticed, which are here omitted, as they are of
a secondary importance, and belong especially to the more protracted
cases.
The _post-mortem_ appearances, the phenomena of the disease, the
Algide, or diminished animal heat, and the loss of nervous power, all
tend to show an obstructed circulation and consequent embarrassment
of respiration resulting in the non-aeration and non-oxydation of the
blood, from which a long train of secondary and non-essential symptoms
arise. For it is affirmed that the mechanical part of respiration
remains in a good degree perfect, and that the heart evidently
continues to beat in many cases till stopped by the want of blood in
the left side and by its accumulation in the right side. Hence, for the
cause of this arrest of the circulation of the blood through the lungs,
we are forced to look to the condition of the blood itself, and the
deranged action of the ganglionic nerves.
Attempts have been made to trace out from analysis the exact chemical
changes in the order of their occurrence which attend the period of
transudation from the blood into the intestinal canal. "The most
prominent phenomena of cholera," says Dr. Aiken, "during this period
of transudation, consists in separation of the water and of the salts
of the intercellular fluid (of the blood) through the mucous membrane
of the intestinal canal, and the retention in the blood of an important
excess of albumen and of blood-cells, with apparently less, but in
reality with great diminution of the salts and fibrin."
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