Medical Inquiries and Observations, Vol. 2: The Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged by the AuthorRush, Benjamin
Science
Medical Inquiries and Observations, Vol. 2: The Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged by the Author
Rush, Benjamin
Medicine; Yellow fever -- Pennsylvania -- Philadelphia
stimulants, that the saliva of a mad dog should affect the fauces, than
that mercury should affect the salivary glands. Both stimuli appear to
act in a specific manner.
2. The hydrophobia partakes of the character of a malignant fever, in
appearing at different intervals from the time in which the infection
is received into the body. These intervals are from one day to five or
six months. The small-pox shows itself in intervals from eight to twenty
days, and the plague and yellow fever from the moment in which the
miasmata are inhaled, to nearly the same distance of time. This latitude
in the periods at which infectious and contagious matters are brought
into action in the body, must be resolved into the influence which the
season of the year, the habits of the patients, and the passion of fear
have upon them.
Where the interval between the time of being bitten, and the appearance
of a dread of water, exceeds five or six months, it is probable it may
be occasioned by a disease derived from another cause. Such a person is
predisposed in common with other people to all the diseases of which
the hydrophobia is a symptom. The recollection of the poisonous wound
he has received, and its usual consequences, is seldom absent from his
mind for months or years. A fever, or an affection of his nerves from
their most common causes, cannot fail of exciting in him apprehensions
of the disease which usually follows the accident to which he has been
exposed. His fears are then let loose upon his system, and produce in
a short time a dread of water which appears to be wholly unconnected
with the bite of a rabid animal. Similar instances of the effects of
fear upon the human body are to be met with in books of medicine. The
pains produced by fear acting upon the imagination in supposed venereal
infections, are as real and severe as they are in the worst state of
that disease.
3. Blood drawn in the hydrophobia exhibits the same appearances which
have been remarked in malignant fevers. In Mr. Bellamy, the gentleman
whose case is so minutely related by Dr. Fothergill, the blood
discovered with "slight traces of size, _serum_ remarkably _yellow_."
It was uncommonly sizy in a boy of Mr. George Oakley whom I saw, and
bled for the first time, on the fourth day of his disease, in the
beginning of the year 1797. His pulse imparted to the fingers the same
kind of quick and tense stroke which is common in an acute inflammatory
fever. He died in convulsions the next day. He had been bitten by a mad
dog on one of his temples, three weeks before he discovered any signs
of indisposition. There are several other cases upon record, of the
blood exhibiting, in this disease, the same appearances as in common
malignant and inflammatory fevers.
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