Clinical observations on the pathology and treatment of continued fever : from cases occurring in the medical practice of St. Bartholomew's Hospital / by Edward Latham Ormerod.

  • Ormerod, Edward Latham, 1819-1873.
Date:
1848
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Clinical observations on the pathology and treatment of continued fever : from cases occurring in the medical practice of St. Bartholomew's Hospital / by Edward Latham Ormerod. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    the purulent infiltrations of the different organs which might seem to have taken place through the medium of the blood, though no changes were noticed in the different veins which were divided, and the bodies looking like pus globules must not be assumed to have been certainly such. With this came the symptoms which it so well interprets, and death. And nothing short of this can fully explain the whole case, though during her life, on seemingly sufficient grounds, it was inter- preted otherwise. She was admitted at a time when erysipelas and indolent unhealthy sores were very common; the gangrenous appearance of the hand was particularly pointed out, and though the pain in her loins was the symptom chiefly dwelt upon, the commence- ment of illness was, by her mother, dated from the rigors. On the observation of the abundant miliary rash, the petechial spots on the feet, and the pain on pressure of the abdomen, there seemed little reason to doubt that the case was one of fever, which diagnosis, it may well be believed, was much con- firmed by the discovery, on the following day, that the toes of another patient who had caught fever in the Hospital were sloughing. It was matter of much surprise, that no sore was to be seen on her back, and when at last a collection of pus, apparently similar to that in Case IX., was discovered more by the hand than the eye, so far from throwing a new light on the case, the observations seemed only to confirm yet further the opinion already received concerning the nature of the disease. Had the abscess been noticed, and its real nature recognised at an earlier period, there is no question that the proper method of proceeding would have been to have opened it, and even in the condition in which she lay when it was discovered, small though the chance might have been of her ultimate recovery, dissection says that this was all that art could have done to save her life. She was exhausted to a degree, and the sloughing sore which might have ensued on the evacuation of the abscess