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
To secure a perfect obedience to medical advice, it would be extremely
useful if consumptive patients could always be accompanied by a
physician. Celsus says, he found it more easy to cure the dropsy in
slaves than in freemen, because they more readily submitted to the
restraints he imposed upon their appetites. Madness has become a curable
disease in England, since the physicians of that country have opened
private mad-houses, and have taken the entire and constant direction
of their patients into their own hands. The same successful practice
would probably follow the treatment of consumptions, if patients were
constantly kept under the eye and authority of their physicians. The
keenness of appetite, and great stock of animal spirits, which those
persons frequently possess, hurry them into many excesses which defeat
the best concerted plans of a recovery; or, if they escape these
irregularities, they are frequently seduced from our directions by every
quack remedy which is recommended to them. Unfortunately the cough
becomes a signal of their disease, at every stage of their journey,
and the easy or pleasant prescriptions of even hostlers and ferrymen,
are often substituted to the self-denial and exertion which have been
imposed by physicians. The love of life in these cases seems to level
all capacities; for I have observed persons of the most cultivated
understandings to yield in common with the vulgar, to the use of these
prescriptions.
In a former volume I mentioned the good effects of accidental LABOUR in
pulmonary consumptions. The reader will find a particular account in the
first volume of Dr. Coxe's Medical Museum, of a clergyman and his wife,
in Virginia, being cured by the voluntary use of that remedy.
The following circumstances and symptoms, indicate the longer or shorter
duration of this disease, and its issue in life and death:
The consumption from gout, rheumatism, and scrophula, is generally of
long duration. It is more rapid in its progress to death, when it arises
from a half cured pleurisy, or neglected colds, measles, and influenza.
It is of shorter duration in persons under thirty, than in those who are
more advanced in life.
It is always dangerous in proportion to the length of time, in which
the debilitating causes, that predisposed to it, have acted upon the
body.
It is more dangerous when a predisposition to it has been derived from
ancestors, than when it has been acquired.
It is generally fatal when accompanied with a bad conformation of the
breast.
Chilly fits occurring in the forenoon, are more favourable than when
they occur in the evening. They indicate the disease to partake a little
of the nature of an intermittent, and are a call for the use of the
remedies proper in that disease.
Rheumatic pains, attended with an abatement of the cough, or pains in
the breast, are always favourable; so are
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