The nature & treatment of the epidemic cholera / by Robert Venables.

Date:
1832
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The nature & treatment of the epidemic cholera / by Robert Venables. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    extensive and matured experience has only served to confirm the views vrhich I have already advocated. The evidence which has traced the disease to contagion, is as convincing to my mind, and proves the contagious character of the disease in the cold, the collapsed, and the typhoid stages, as fully as such a subject will permit. However, I do not believe that either the preliminary diarrhoea or the premonitory stage are, generally speak- ing, contagious. In fact, contagion is not an integrant of febrile disease; but an accessory—the product of the morbid operations of the animal economy, while labouring for a time under the influence of fever. Thus, if a person be exposed to the contagion of typhus, he is seized with fever ; but the commencement of that fever is not contagious, although it becomes contagious during the morbid operations of the animal economy. Therefore, contagion, according to this view, is not a primary, but an acquired principle. Diagnosis and Prognosis.—The Diagnosis of Cho- lera is not very difficult in either the cold or collapsed stages, and, unfortunately, here it is not of that material importance. A diagnosis in the preliminary diarrhoea and in the premonitory stage would be of infinitely greater utility. I know of no means of determining whether the diarrhoea be the preliminary to an attack of Cholera or not; unless, indeed, it be the frequency and severity of the purging. There is in some cases a most anxious expression of countenance, and not unfre- quently in very severe cases the voice is much affected, so that the intonations are in a whisper, and scarcely audible. However, the vox cholerica, as it is called, is net to be looked upon as an invariable symptom, as fre- quently it never appears at all, ven in fatal cases,— D