Two cases of post-typhoid anæmia : with remarks on the value of examinations of the blood in typhoid fever / by W.S. Thayer.

  • Thayer, William Sydney, 1864-1932.
Date:
[1894?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Two cases of post-typhoid anæmia : with remarks on the value of examinations of the blood in typhoid fever / by W.S. Thayer. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

    6/34
    tion of the urine during typhoid fever, one finds that those pigments which appear to be derived from the destruction of the haemoglobin are found in normal or diminished quantities, while those which come from an increased corpuscular destruction are absent or very rare. If, however, there is an inflammatory process in connection with the typhoid fever, then the red corpuscles diminish in number and the pigments derived from them begin to appear in the urine. Holst(3,) (1885) reports a case of typhoid fever complicated with a grave ( pernicious ) anaemia in a young girl of 20 which ended fatally at about the beginning of the third week. The anaemia, however, apparently preceded the fever. Leclerc(SS) (1887), in an interesting- study of the effects of the cold bath, antipyrin and acetanilide on the blood in ten cases of typhoid fever, concludes that the cold bath alone has little if any effect on the blood corpuscles. While antipyrin has but a slight effect, acetanilide has a deleterious action. In the three cases treated with the cold bath alone, the diminution in the number of red corpuscles was moderate. Tumas<40) (1887) in twenty cases found that while the number of red corpuscles was normal or even increased at the beginning of the process, it diminished gradu- ally during the fever, but showed a more marked and sudden falling off at the beginning of the afebrile period. This anaemia lasted for a considerable time, as the blood was restored very slowly to its normal condition. Hayem(tl) lays more stress upon the importance of this post-typhoid anaemia. According to him, the number of corpuscles per cubic millimetre is but slightly modified during the first weeks of the disease. It oscillates between 4,500,000 and 5,000,000, and sometimes more, a fact which he thinks can only be explained by supposing a very slight destruction of corpuscles, or an actual con- densation of the blood as a whole. This condensation, he thinks, cannot be doubted in some cases. He has, in fact, seen as a result of profuse sweating or very profuse diarrhoea, a sudden increase in the number of corpuscles to a point even above normal, in one case as high as 5,700,000, a phenomenon comparable to that which is seen in the algid stage of cholera. During the course or towards the end of the third week there is a rather sudden diminution in the number of red corpuscles, which have so far resisted the process of the disease. The continued fever is, he believes, the principal cause of this destruction of the red corpuscles, as in the milder cases there is but little change in the number of the colored elements. In one