Volume 1

A system of medicine / edited by J. Russell Reynolds.

Date:
1866-1879
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A system of medicine / edited by J. Russell Reynolds. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    257/976 (page 237)
    it was occasioned by tlie same epidemic cause, and required the same sustaining plan of treatment that his father adopted. Unfortunately, though argued with learning and experience, these views did not prevail; the name of Croup was applied to the epidemic complication, and the treatment laid down by Home for the one disease was very energetically employed against the other. The divergence of opinion tended to stimulate the collection of facts bearing on the subject. The accounts of epidemic Croup, though generally referring to the disease now known as diphtheria, doubtless comprehend some cases of simple Croup; some of our own accounts of Croup probably in- clude cases of diphtheria; it was to illustrate the tracheal complication of the epidemic that both the great concours on Croup were instituted at Paris; yet the prize essays of MM. Vieusseux and Jurine, of Geneva, and of Albers, of Bremen, are among the most valuable con- tributions to our knowledge of Croup as an independent disease ; and, though the tendency in Prance has since been to restrict the term, Croup, to one of the accidents of diphtheria, the opposite view has in that country been maintained with great ability by MM. Bricheteau, Desruelles, Emangard, and especially in the valuable original work of M. Blaud, of Beaucaire.* A similar controversy, arising under condi- tions more allied to those of our own country, has been continued in Northern Germany since the time of Wichman of Hanover, starting from a line of distinction being drawn between its spasmodic or inflammatory nature; the treatise of Goelis of Yiennaf is however sufficiently comprehensive. In America the “Observations on Cy- nanche Trachealis,” published in the first volume of Medical Inquiries and Observations, by Dr. Benjamin Rush, will ever stand as one of the clearest and most practical accounts of the disease. - In our own country we have the careful study of Cheyne,l enriched, as it is, by the admirable pathological drawings from the hand of'Sir C. Bell: it forms a worthy sequel to the work of Home, conceived and executed in the same spirit, from observations made in the same locality at no great distance of time. We have also the matured experience of the same author, gained in Dublin and its neighbourhood, published thirty years later in the Encyclopedia of Practical Medicine. Dr. Charles Wilson of Edinburgh has published, in the Edinburgh Journal of Medicine for 1855-56, a philosophical review of the whole subject.