Historical notices, designed to illustrate the question whether typhus ought to be classed among the exanthematous fevers / [Charles West].

  • West, Charles, 1816-1898
Date:
[1840]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Historical notices, designed to illustrate the question whether typhus ought to be classed among the exanthematous fevers / [Charles West]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    yet did not present quite tlie features of bubonic plague, and though occasionally so suddenly fatal that people fell down dead while seated at table, yet usually it ran a much more protracted course. It began with violent pain in the head, vomiting, and often with fainting. The body was bathed in a profuse sweat, at¬ tended with a sense of pungent heat; and the thirst was intense, and unrelieved by drink. In some patients buboes appeared on the seventh day, in others exanthemata showed themselves at that time, and these were usually looked upon as favourable symptoms; —for most persons, in whom they did not occui, suffered fiom in¬ cessant watchfulness, violent delirium, and profuse sweats; and ultimately died. The evidence of Diemerbroeck* as to the transmutation of pe¬ techial fever into plague at Nimeguen in the year 1635 is parti¬ cularly valuable. He informs us, that, during the spring of 1635, a pestilential epidemic fever was very prevalent through the whole province of Gruelders. The summer was hot, the autumn still hot¬ ter, and during it putrid diseases increased ; small-pox, measles, di¬ arrhoea, and dysentery of the worst kind abounded. Sed omnium maxime prsedicta febris pestilens, quse indies majora incrementa sumens, magis magisque in pejus mutabatur, et purpurata, (quam Petechialem vocant Itali) evadebat; donee tandem in apertissi- mam pestem transiret.” It would not be very easy to find, even at the present day, a better treatise on typhous fever than that of Riverius,f who was an eye-witness to the pestilence which prevailed at Montpelier, after the siege of that city in the year 1623, and which carried off a third of its inhabitants. Riverius seems to have had a mind more independent and less shackled by names and systems than most of his predecessors, and, accordingly, having observed the great similarity between febris pestilens, or plague, and febris maligna, he treats of the two diseases together. He remarks that no single symptom can be set down as pathognomonic of these diseases, for in true plague bubo and carbuncle do not always appear, neither is the febris purpurata invariably characterized by the eruption of spots, nor are all the symptoms of these affections ever found assembled in one person. That which is distinctive of pestilential fevers is, that all the symptoms have a peculiar character which is not met with in other fevers, and that the different symptoms do not correspond with each other; thus, for instance, while the pulse is scarcely affected the patient suffers intense pain in the head, and is in a state of watchfulness or delirium. He likewise observes, that fevers attended with many symptoms of pestilence, even with * Opera Omnia. Ultrajecti, 1685. Tractatus de Peste, Lib. i. Cap. iii. | Lazari Riverii, Praxis Medica. Editio Nona, Hagac Comitis, 1658. Tome ii. Lib. xvii. Scctio iii. pp. 437—488.