On the treatment of pulmonary consumption : by hygiene, climate, and medicine : with an appendix on the sanitaria of the United States, Switzerland, and the Balearic Islands / by James Henry Bennet.

  • Bennet, James Henry, 1816-1891.
Date:
1878
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the treatment of pulmonary consumption : by hygiene, climate, and medicine : with an appendix on the sanitaria of the United States, Switzerland, and the Balearic Islands / by James Henry Bennet. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    tory complications supervene, but they are clearly secondary. The new hist* logical inflammation theory offers no clearer or more satisfactory explanation to my mind of what we see clinically in every stage of the disease than did the doctrines of Broussais. Nor does the inflammation theory lead to a correct practical view of the pathology and treatment of the disease. Most of the patients whom I see in the winter at Mentone, labouring under pulmonary Consumption and imbued with these doctrines, medi- cal and non-medical, take a most erroneous view of their case. They seem to think it a trifling indispo- sition, one that will give way readily to a few weeks' or months' leisure and treatment, one that need give them little or no uneasiness as to the future. There is nothing very serious or terrible, they think, and not unfrequently say, in a slight catarrhal pneumonia, in a patch of inflammatory consolidation at the apex of the lungs. Even a large phthisical cavity, which places them in the third stage of Phthisis, is merely a scrofulous abscess that will soon get well. Again, with this idea of inflammation in their minds they are disinclined to adopt the sthenic treatment re- commended in the preceding chapters. They are disposed to coddle themselves, to shut themselves up day and night in close rooms, to fall back into a mild Broussaism; in a word, in treatment, as in ideas, they have a tendency to revert to the doctrines and practice of thirty years ago. Thus, by these histo- logical theories, the onward therapeutical progress of