On the occurrence and significance of intestinal haemorrhage in typhoid fever : a thesis for an act for the degree of M.B. in the University of Cambridge / by William Collingridge.

  • Collingridge, William.
Date:
1879
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the occurrence and significance of intestinal haemorrhage in typhoid fever : a thesis for an act for the degree of M.B. in the University of Cambridge / by William Collingridge. 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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    usually profuse, and although there was a marked tendency to recurrence, still no evil symptoms followed. These two cases I have chosen from a large number, as examples of the first class of cases I wish to bring forward. The second class of cases, which is by far the larger (out of 60 cases of haemorrhage 50 belonged to this division), is altogether a more formidable one. Here the cause is usually to be found in an actual erosion of some vessel in the intestinal walls by the process of ulceration, or it may be to a fungating condition of some undetached sloughs. o In either case the loss of blood is mostly profuse, and may occasionally, though happily not often, prove immediately fatal. More frequently, however, the hEemorrhage either ceases by itself or is arrested by suitable treatment, leaving the patient much lowered by the loss, or it may recur from time to time, and so exhaust his already overtaxed resources that he finally succumbs to asthenia, or to some intercurrent disease. Such are the chief dangers of haemorrhage if it be profuse, but unfortunately it has another evil signifi- cance. Whenever it occurs it may almost certainly be taken as an indication of the extent to which the ulceration has proceeded. For in order to involve a vessel the morbid process must have obtained a considerable depth, and must, therefore, leave the patient in imminent danger of perforation, or, as may happen, of peritonitis by extension of inflam- mation from the intestinal walls.