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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    ed by a siirgeon accustomed to anatomical examinations, and nothinsr was found but a little more serum than is usual in the ventricles.' If the reader has perused the foregoing case attentively, and has reflected on it, he will of course draw his own con- clusions. I can draw no other than these; that the heaviness of head and drowsiness which were attributed to congestion in the brain, really depended on a deficiency of nervous energy ; that the bleeding and scanty diet aggrava- ted this state, and caused the death of the child ; also, that the state of the eye which so speedily followed the loss of blood, and which resembled that occasioned by effusion, did, in reality, depend on deficiency in the circulation of the brain a fact of considerable curiosity and importance. I will now relate a case similar in the symptoms but very different in the treatment and results. Case 6.—■ I was going out of town one afternoon last sum- mer, when a gentleman drove up to my door in a coach, and entreated me to go and see his child, which he said had something the matter with its head, and that the medical gentleman of the family was in the house, just going to apply leeches. I went with him immediately; and when I entered the nursery I found a child ten months old, lying on its nurse's lap, exactly in the state which I have already descri- bed—the same unwillingness to hold its head up, the same drowsiness, languor, absence of heat, and all symptoms of fever. The child was not small of its age, and had not been weak, but it had been weaned about two months, since which it had never thriven. The leeches had not been put on. I took the medical gentleman into another room, rela- ted to him the foregoing case, and several similar to it, which had been treated in the same way. Tlien I related to him a similar case which I liad seen in the nci<rhborino- square, which had been treated with ammonia in decoction of bark and good diet, which had recovered ; not slowly, so as to make it doubtful whctlier the treatment was tlio cause of the recovery, but so speedily that at the third visit I took