Two lectures on cholera and intermittent fever / [Charles William Bell].

  • Bell, Charles William, 1811?-1862.
Date:
1849
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Two lectures on cholera and intermittent fever / [Charles William Bell]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    18/114 (page 10)
    Both classes no doubt produce effecls on the sympa- thetic, but the first, (the animal poison,) acting by a continuous irritation, produces a persistent eflFortof the emunctuaries to remove the poison from the blood, or continued fever; the second, (malaria,) acting solely by nervous impression on the sympathetic, produces merely a struggle between the impression which is opposed to vitality, and those sensations and actions that are provided for the maintenance of animal life. This struggle is what we observe to take [jlace in the inter- mitting and congestive fever, &c. If malarious poison actually changed the constitu- tion of the blood, it would be as impossible to cut short a fit of ague as an attack of small-pox or scarlatina; 'but it is possible to cut short an ague, by means which (as we shall see when we consider the treatment of intermittent,) are not one of them calculated to produce an essential change on the blood itself. There would, too, in all probability, be some evidence of an elimina- tion of the poison by the fit, as by the skin in the exanthemata, which there is not; or some diflferenoe in the blood drawn several hours before and after the fit'; but in both cases it is equally incapable of propagating the disease by inoculation. Besides, it appears scarcely possible to account for the leading, characteristic of the whole class of these fevers—their periodicity—on any principle but by the law of^nw^vou^ impressions,—viz., that long-continued impression of an object upon a nerve of sensation impairs its sensi-