An account of the eruptive diseases which have lately appeared in the Military Hospitals of Edinburgh, both naturally and after inoculation / [John Hennen].

  • Hennen, John, 1779-1828
Date:
[1818]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An account of the eruptive diseases which have lately appeared in the Military Hospitals of Edinburgh, both naturally and after inoculation / [John Hennen]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    with it; a distinction which may seriously involve the value of the most important of all modern medical discoveries, the Jen- nerian plan of counteracting the ravages of variola, and impli¬ cate the happiness and the lives of thousands in this and every other country of the globe. The following cases have already excited great curiosity 5 they have been seen by a large and most respectable body of private prac¬ titioners ; accounts of them have been widely circulated in letters and conversations, and some of them I have, at Dr Monro’s request, given to him for insertion in nis work. Much error and misr< presentation may, however, have got abroad in the oral and epistolary accounts of them, and only a very few of them are to be found in the publication of Dr Monro; neither can the chain of events, both antecedent and subsequent, have been so completely kept up in his book, or in the occasional notes taken by other individuals, as I have been enabled to do, from my con¬ tinued inspection of all the patients, and from my being in posses¬ sion of the complete series of the hospital records, and of every other source of information which can throw lighton a subject so obscure, and involved in so many difficulties. Under these cir¬ cumstances, therefore, I consider it by far the most likely mode of arriving at just conclusions, arid of satisfying the minds of the pubijjc, and the doubts of individuals who may be in possession of only some detached facts, and even these, perhaps, not stated with perfect correctness,—to submit at once to the profession the entire series of ca^es, consecutively and uninterruptedly, as they have occurred. I here beg leave to take an opportunity of again expressing, what I have already done elsewhere, that I shall feel on all occasions the greatest pleasure in seconding the views of my respected chief, Sir James M‘Grigor, the Director-General of the Army Medical Department, by throwing open the wards of the military hospitals under my control, and submitting the records of the practice followed in them, to my brethren in civil life, accepting for myself and the military practitioners who act along with me, the benefit to be derived from a mutual com¬ munication of professional opinions. It will be necessary for me, before entering upon the history of the cases, to make a few preliminary remarks. It is well known that Small-pox has for some time past existed in this city and its neighbourhood, both under its usual and its modified forms ; and your last number has already furnished us with some highly interesting and important details upon the subject. Varicella also has existed ai the same time in a genuine and un¬ equivocal lorm. From the co-existence of these two diseases, and from the great difficulty that is frequently experienced in dis-