Medical Inquiries and Observations, Vol. 1: The Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged by the AuthorRush, Benjamin
History
Medical Inquiries and Observations, Vol. 1: The Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged by the Author
Rush, Benjamin
Medicine; Yellow fever -- Pennsylvania -- Philadelphia
The month of September was cool and dry, and the scarlatina anginosa
became epidemic among adults as well as young people. In most of the
patients who were affected by it, it came on with a chilliness and a
sickness at the stomach, or a vomiting; which last was so invariably
present, that it was with me a pathognomonic sign of the disease. The
matter discharged from the stomach was always bile. The swelling of
the throat was in some instances so great, as to produce a difficulty
of speaking, swallowing, and breathing. In a few instances, the speech
was accompanied by a squeaking voice, resembling that which attends the
cynanche trachealis. The ulcers on the tonsils were deep, and covered
with white, and, in some instances, with black sloughs. In several
cases, there was a discharge of a thick mucus from the nose, from the
beginning, but it oftener occurred in the decline of the disease, which
most frequently happened on the fifth day. Sometimes the subsiding of
the swelling of the throat was followed by a swelling behind the ears.
An eruption on the skin generally attended the symptoms which have been
described. But this symptom appeared with considerable variety. In some
people it preceded, and in others it followed the ulcers and swelling of
the throat. In some, it appeared only on the outside of the throat, and
on the breast; in others, it appeared chiefly on the limbs. In a few it
appeared on the second or third day of the disease, and never returned
afterwards. I saw two cases of eruption without a single symptom of
sore throat. The face of one of those patients was swelled, as in the
erisypelas. In the other, a young girl of seven years old, there was
only a slight redness on the skin. She was seized with a vomiting, and
died delirious in fifty-four hours. Soon after her death, a livid colour
appeared on the outside of her throat.
The bowels, in this degree of the disease, were in general regular. I
can recollect but few cases which were attended by a diarrh[oe]a.
The fever which accompanied the disease was generally the typhus mitior
of Doctor Cullen. In a few cases it assumed symptoms of great malignity.
The disease frequently went off with a swelling of the hands and feet.
I saw one instance in a gentlewoman, in whom this swelling was absent,
who complained of very acute pains in her limbs, resembling those of the
rheumatism.
In two cases which terminated fatally, there were large abscesses; the
one on the outside, and the other on the inside of the throat. The first
of these cases was accompanied by troublesome sores on the ends of the
fingers. One of these patients lived twenty-eight, and the other above
thirty days, and both appeared to die from the discharge which followed
the opening of their abscesses.
Between the degrees of the disease which I have described, there were
many intermediate degrees of indisposition which belonged to this
disease.
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