Short treatise on typhus fever / [George Leith Roupell].

  • Roupell, George Leith, 1797-1854
Date:
1839
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Short treatise on typhus fever / [George Leith Roupell]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    How can the advocate of this theory account for the effusion of lymph or pus upon the brain or into the pleurae, as seen in post mortem examina¬ tions ; how can he explain why the solid lung- sinks in water, or why ulceration successively destroys each tunic of the intestine, and finally perforates its coats ; such effects are produced by typhus, but never can arise from debility. Weakness indeed has its own peculiar characteristics, but far differing from those mentioned above. Ex¬ haustion is not well pourtrayed in the fierce look and congested eye of early and furious de¬ lirium ; hurried breathing, dullness of the chest on percussion, with crepitation, but badly support the theory of debility ; tenderness of the abdo¬ men, with watery or sanguineous evacuations,point out other mischief than deficient nervous energy, yet ail these are constantly met with in typhus. Dr. Bateman, in treating of the epidemic fever of his dav, which he considered to be the same with the putrid pestilential fever of Huxham and Sy¬ denham, makes some excellent remarks upon this subject, and thus expresses the mode by which the conviction of the efficacy of a treatment, irre- concileable to the theory of debility, was forced upon him :—I believe there are few physicians, who, like myself, commenced their professional career impressed with the doctrines that pre- vailed in the schools at the close of the past century, when the terror of debility was cer- tainly predominant, who will not confess that their subsequent practice has been a continued struggle between the prejudices of education