A letter addressed to His Excellency the Right Honorable General the Earl of Chatham, K. G., governor of Gibraltar &c., relative to the febrile distempers of that garrison / by W.W. Fraser, Esq., inspector of hospitals and medical superintendant of quarantine at Gibraltar.

  • Fraser, W. W. (William Wemyss)
Date:
1826
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A letter addressed to His Excellency the Right Honorable General the Earl of Chatham, K. G., governor of Gibraltar &c., relative to the febrile distempers of that garrison / by W.W. Fraser, Esq., inspector of hospitals and medical superintendant of quarantine at Gibraltar. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

    40/68 (page 32)
    dangerous, if not mortal, and it was uniformly dreaded by the patients. In reports which I have had the honour to make on this subject, in 1813 and 1814, I stated, that in certain cases of little danger the lancet might be used amongst the robust and sanguineous, especially during warm weather; but in the majority of cases, and those of real danger, the lancet was perfectly inadmissible ; thus closely corresponding do we find those reports which are actually made from the beds of the sick. A feeble sketch may be all that is given on the one hand, whilst the work of a master is presented on the other; still subjects truly drawn from nature cannot essentially vary. The above report of the 11th regiment, is cited in oppo- sition to the sounding theories of a host of names, which have been quoted, or rather trepanned, into the service of au- thorship; and from the example, and fair consideration of of the published experience of latter years, it can only be deduced, that in mild attacks of the malady, as happens in the young and sanguine, venesection may be adopted, but in the worst forms of the disease, the lancet opens the door to the grave. In other words we may bleed in the milder cases, but in those truly of greatest danger, most of the authors who have written in favour of venesection, would hesitate and confess their disappointment, as Doctor Jackson of New York has done. Possibly, modifications of the same distemper may, by metastasis, strike an individual apoplectically, or they may cause painful and inflammatory determination to the several viscera during a hot season ; but the attacks of the Epidemic, in treneral, run into a class of symptoms of very different appearance,—deadly sickness,—general coldness of the frame not excitable to re-action by the usual means,—debility and syncope, increased by slight abstractions of blood, and fol- lowed by irretrievable prostration of the vital powers, de- fying the most energetic stimuli. In fine, physicians have been baffled by a train of symp- toms, similar to the effects produced by certain poisons act- ing on the stomach, and through its medium affecting the nervous operations, so as to cause, not only a similitude of phenomena, when acting, but as sudden an attack as that, consequent to the swallowing of poison, and as quickly proving mortal, and bearing traces of similar organic