Essay on cholera infantum / by M.L. Knapp.

  • Knapp, M. L. (Moses L.), 1799-1879.
Date:
1855
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Essay on cholera infantum / by M.L. Knapp. 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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    fautum of Rush — is, vomiting and purging, with fever generally of the remittent type, [which is commonly the scorbutic type,] irregular spasmodic convulsions, and rapid emaciation, attacking infants and children, which defini- tion, save in the age of the subjects, will answer with tech- nical accuracy for Cholera Adultorum, to make use of the legitimate correlative term, for convenient contradistinction. The same author says, that the'subjects of Choleric Fever are infants of two or three weeks to several years of age, and that after this period, the causes that produce it occasion Epidemic GholeraP This latter assertion which I have put in italics, though doubtless true, differs from all American writers consulted, who fail to light up the dark, unfathomed abyss of the essential nature, pathology and true cause of the disease, by assuming it to be the infantile mode of mani- festation of Cholera-morbus, an irritation believed to arise from a surfeit, or offending ingesta, especially the indulgence in ascessant vegetables and fruits; and this apparently acci- dental stumbling upon the trath by Dr. Copland, is inconsist- ent with his own view, that Epidemic Cholera is propagated by contagion—no writer whatever, so far as I have consulted authorities, has supposed Cholera Infantum to originate from or to be propagated by contagion. The limit, several years of age, set, at which Cholera Infantum retires, and Cholera Adultorum takes the field, is so palpably an arbitrary, forced, indefinite and unnatural limitation, and so useless and sense- less if the cause producing both the infantile form in subjects over several years of age, and the adult form be the same, that it is a forcible commentary on the evil influence of nosology: still there is a great truth herein shadowed forth and maintained, viz., the unity of causation of Cholera a?id Cholera Infantum, which makes the supposed two diseases one in fact, essentially the same, differing in nothing, save as the symptoms are modified by the ages of the subjects- just what I hold. Most of the American writers who treat of this scourge, not only maintain that it is peculiar to infants and children