A treatise on the continued fevers of Great Britain / by Charles Murchison.

  • Murchison, Charles, 1830-1879.
Date:
1862
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A treatise on the continued fevers of Great Britain / by Charles Murchison. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    intermittent fevers, as all modifications of the same afiection, tlie poison of all being the same.^ But granting that the diiferent continued fevers were essentially and fundamentally alike, it would still be hardly less important to be able to distinguish them as forms or varieties of disease. In a practical point of view, the necessity of an accurate diagnosis is the same, whether we regard them as species or varieties. The evidence in favour of non-identity, and the arguments urged in support of identity, will engage our attention hereafter : but, in the mean time, it may be well to mention some of the circum- stances which, for so long a period, led to the diiferent continued fevers being confounded, and which have not ceased to operate at the present time. They are mainly the following:— 1. Observers, who have had experience in only one form of Continued Fever, have naturally thought that all cases resembled those which came under their own notice, and have consequently arrived at the conckision that there is but one species. It is thus that many distinguished physicians in France, whose experience was limited for the most part to the so-called ' Fievre typhoide/ found it difficult to believe in the existence of typhus, as a distinct affection; while, on the other hand, the comparatively few cases of the French fever observed at Edinburgh were regarded as a complicated variety of the true typhus, which was there so prevalent. 2. Arguments have been frequently based on the name assigned to a disease prevalent at a given time or place, instead of on the disease itself. It is a remarkable fact, that several writers have argued as if previous observers had employed the terms Tj^hus, Typhoid, etc., with strict accuracy, when they themselves failed to recognise any specific distinction between the diseases in question. 3. Different fevers have frequently been epidemic at the same time, and the published descriptions have included both, as one disease, under one name. 4. In the case of Relapsing Fever, the relapse has often not been recognised, from the patient being seen in one of the attacks only. 5. Much confusion has arisen from the undefined meaning attached to the term petechia. In its ordinary acceptation, this word implies small circumscribed extravasations of blood in the * See Smith, 1830, p. 75; Henderson, 1843, p. 202; Miss Nightingale's Notes on Nursing, p. 19.