Lectures on the eruptive fevers : delivered at St Thomas's Hospital, in January 1843 / by George Gregory.

Date:
1843
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Lectures on the eruptive fevers : delivered at St Thomas's Hospital, in January 1843 / by George Gregory. 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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    prevent the splitting of the vessel. By drawing off some blood, you prevent the overdistending, inflaming, and rending the vessels of the human body.” I can give you no rules as to the quantity of blood to be drawn. Consider the circumstances of each case, and be guided by them. Your object is to unload and relieve the lungs, the liver, or the brain. Whenever, therefore, these organs are gorged, and their functions impeded by a load of stagnant or inflamed blood—when intense headache, extreme irritability of the stomach, oppressed breathing, with a full labouring pulse, give evidence of such general or local congestion, draw blood, and let the quantity drawn be such as to relieve the urgent symptom. In some cases, when headache pre- dominates, with suffusion of the eyes, leeches applied to the temples afford all the relief which is required to take off the strain from the vessels. It is under these cir- cumstances that active purgative pills, followed by a laxative draught, are so useful in diverting the fluids from the head and surface to a mucous membrane which is never implicated in the ordinary march of the dis- order. Some writers, in their zeal for blood-letting, have tried to persuade themselves that it is the only measure which can be relied on to lessen confluence, and to prevent the development of pustules in the mucous membrane of the throat and trachea. This opinion is altogether erroneous. Bleeding has no effect on the quantity of eruption, whe- ther cutaneous or mucous. The most confluent eruption has succeeded to the most vigorous employment of the lancet. To bleed, therefore, merely because small pox is anticipated, with the view, thereby, of preventing con- fluence, is uselessly to expend that power which will be required for the repair of injury to the surface. You G 2