Medical Inquiries and Observations, Vol. 3: The Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged by the AuthorRush, Benjamin
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Medical Inquiries and Observations, Vol. 3: The Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged by the Author
Rush, Benjamin
Medicine; Yellow fever -- Pennsylvania -- Philadelphia
I saw one person who recovered from an affection of the lungs, by means
of a copious expectoration of yellow phlegm and mucus. But the _brain_
was principally affected with morbid congestion in this disease. It was
indicated by the suffusion of blood in the face, by the redness of the
eyes, by a dilatation of the pupils, by the pain in the head, by the
hæmorrhages from the nose and ears, by the sickness or vomiting, and by
an almost universal costive state of the bowels. I wish to impress the
reader with these facts, for they formed one of the strongest indications
for the use of the remedies which I adopted for the cure of this disease.
It is difficult to determine the exact state of these viscera in every
case of bilious and yellow fever. Inflammation certainly takes place in
some cases, and internal hæmorrhages in others; but I believe the most
frequent affection of these viscera consists in a certain morbid
accumulation of blood in them, which has been happily called, by Dr.
Clark, an _engorgement_ or choaking of the blood-vessels. I believe
further, with Dr. Clark[20] and Dr. Balfour[21], that death in most cases
in bilious fevers is the effect of these morbid congestions, and wholly
unconnected with an exhausted state of the system, or a supposed
putrefaction in the fluids. It is true, the dissections of Dr. Physick
and Dr. Cathrall (to be mentioned hereafter) discovered no morbid
appearances in any of the viscera which have been mentioned, but it
should be remembered, that these dissections were made early in the
disease. Dr. Annan attended the dissection of a brain of a patient who
died at Bush-hill some days afterwards, and observed the blood-vessels to
be unusually turgid. In those cases where congestion only takes place, it
is as easy to conceive that all morbid appearances in the brain may cease
after death, as that the suffusion of blood in the face should disappear
after the retreat of the blood from the extremities of the vessels, in
the last moments of life. It is no new thing for morbid excitement of the
brain to leave either slender, or no marks of disease after death. This,
I have said, is often the case where it exceeds that degree of action
which produces an effusion of red blood into serous vessels, or what is
called inflammation[22]. Dr. Quin has given a dissection of the brain of
a child that died with all the symptoms of hydrocephalus internus, and
yet nothing was discovered in the brain but a slight turgescence of its
blood-vessels. Dr. Girdlestone says, no injury appeared in the brains of
those persons who died of the symptomatic apoplexy, which occurred in a
spasmodic disease which he describes in the East-Indies; and Mr. Clark
informs us, that the brain was in a natural state in every case of death
from puerperile fever, notwithstanding it seemed to be affected in many
cases soon after the attack of that disease[23].
[20] Vol. i. p. 168.
[21] Treatise on the Intestinal Remitting Fever, p. 125.
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