The Caledonian medical journal : new series, vol. VI, no. 2, October, 1904 / edited by W.A. Macnaughton and Andrew Little.

  • Caledonian Medical Society.
Date:
1904
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The Caledonian medical journal : new series, vol. VI, no. 2, October, 1904 / edited by W.A. Macnaughton and Andrew Little. 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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    to say, no Indian writer has mentioned haemoglohinuria as a feature in the p.yretology of Hindustan or of the East. The disease occurs, but is rare, in south Europe; cases are some- times met with in Greece, Italy, and Sardinia. Possibly it has been overlooked in many places. “ There may be another explanation for the singular silence on the subject of hiemoglobinuric fever of the clasical writers on Indian diseases; they may have confounded it with bilious remittent. It is difficult to believe, however, that the large number of acute observers who have studied Indian diseases so carefully, and for so many years, could have systematically overlooked this striking disease. Possibly, therefore, it is of recent introduction into India. Such an idea is countenanced by the fact that certain medical men practising in Africa, good observers, declare that this form of malaria is of comparatively recent introduction there, and, moreover, that it is yearly becoming more common in that continent.” The above quotation may suffice to indicate how much ground for controversy, touching its etiology, &c., the malady affords. The preliminary symptoms of an attack of blackwater fever are not unlike those which characterise the onset of malarial fever; and, as a rule, the patient, who has invariably suffered more that once before from malarial fever, regards them as heralding an ordinary “go of fever.” There are a few patients who can detect a something different in their symptoms, still more who can recognise this something in subsequent attacks, and a very few of the latter who can unerringly prognosticate an attack of the malady; but this something is always vague and ill-defined, and the patient, even if he be himself a medical man, can never clearly describe it in words—he realises it in much the same manner as primitive man “feels” the presence of an enemy in his hunting; ground. The disease is characterised by fever, and this fever is ushered in by rigor; and this rigor, like that which ushers in an ordinary attack of malarial fever, may vary in character from the slightest shivering to the most severe fit of ague. The rigor passes into the hot stage, and here the ground which may be called absolutely common to blackwater and ordinary malarial fever ends. In an ordinary case of malarial fever the hot stage would in a few hours pass into the sweating one, with a return to a normal temperature afterthe suffererhad or had not experienced