Medical Inquiries and Observations, Vol. 3: The Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged by the Author — John Shaqi
Medical Inquiries and Observations, Vol. 3: The Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged by the AuthorRush, Benjamin
Science
Medical Inquiries and Observations, Vol. 3: The Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged by the Author
Rush, Benjamin
Medicine; Yellow fever -- Pennsylvania -- Philadelphia
4. Many persons had eruptions which resembled moscheto bites. They were
red and circumscribed. They appeared chiefly on the arms, but they
sometimes extended to the breast. Like the yellow colour of the skin,
they appeared and disappeared two or three times in the course of the
disease.
5. Petechiæ were common in the latter stage of the fever. They sometimes
came on in large, and at other times in small red blotches; but they soon
acquired a dark colour. In most cases they were the harbingers of death.
6. Several cases of carbuncles, such as occur in the plague, came under
my notice. They were large and hard swellings on the limbs, with a black
apex, which, upon being opened, discharged a thin, dark-coloured, bloody
matter. From one of these malignant sores a hæmorrhage took place, which
precipitated the death of the amiable widow of Dr. John Morris.
7. A large and painful anthrax on the back succeeded a favourable issue
of the fever in the Rev. Dr. Blackwell.
8. I met with a woman who showed me the marks of a number of small boils
on her face and neck, which accompanied her fever.
Notwithstanding this disposition to cutaneous eruptions in this disease,
it was remarkable that blisters were much less disposed to mortify than
in the common nervous fever. I met with only one case in which a
deep-seated ulcer followed the application of blisters to the legs. Such
was the insensibility of the skin in some people, that blisters made no
impression upon it.
IX. The _blood_ in this fever has been supposed to undergo a change from
a healthy to a putrid state, and many of its symptoms which have been
described, particularly the hæmorrhages and eruptions on the skin, have
been ascribed to this supposed putrefaction of the blood. It would be
easy to multiply arguments, in addition to those mentioned in another
place[27], to prove that no such thing as putrefaction can take place in
the blood, and that the symptoms which have been supposed to prove its
existence are all effects of a sudden, violent, and rapid inflammatory
action or pressure upon the blood-vessels, and hence the external and
internal hæmorrhages. The petechiæ on the surface of the skin depend upon
the same cause. They are nothing but effusions of serum or red blood,
from a rupture or preternatural dilatation of the capillary vessels[28].
The smell emitted from persons affected by this disease was far from
being of a putrid nature; and if this had been the case, it would not
have proved the existence of putrefaction in the blood, for a putrid
smell is often discharged from the lungs, and from the pores in sweat,
which is wholly unconnected with a putrid, or perhaps any other morbid
state of the blood. There are plants which discharge an odour which
conveys to the nose a sensation like that of putrefaction; and yet these
plants exist, at the same time, in a state of the most healthy
vegetation: nor does the early putrid smell of a body which perishes with
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