The influence of tropical climates on European constitutions: being a treatise on the principal diseases incidental to Europeans in the East and West Indies, Mediterranean, and coast of Africa (Volume 2).

  • Johnson, James, 1777-1845.
Date:
1824
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The influence of tropical climates on European constitutions: being a treatise on the principal diseases incidental to Europeans in the East and West Indies, Mediterranean, and coast of Africa (Volume 2). Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    I hardly know how a surgeon could prescribe, or a patient take, « full meals of animal food, in a violent and acute fever, where all appetite is almost invaria- bly destroyed. But the medicines were quite suffici- ent to produce the fatal catastrophe which followed. Those who did not fall immediate sacrifices, were constantly relapsing; several as frequently as three times, most of them once, and some of them were daily attacked with dysentery, p. 159. This was not all; for the visceral dei-angemcnts induced by these protracted and repeated attacks incapacitated them in great numbers for the service of their country, and left them to drag out a miserable existence in in- digence and disease! Such are the fruits of adhering to Brunonian theories, and the doctrines of debility and putrescency, taught with such complacency and importance in academic bowers and learned halls. I have hinted that certain modifications of the treat- ment pursued by our author, would be necessary in the bilious remittent fevers of warmer climates, and the reason is obvious ; although in the Mediterranean the range of the thermometer equals at certain sea- sons the scale of tropical temperature, yet there is not that perennial ardor which, in equatorial regions, keeps the functions of the liver in so deranged a state as to render that organ peculiarly predisposed to dis- ease, when the balance of the circulation is violently disturbed, as i,n remittent and intermittent fevers. On this account, liberal evacuations in the early stages of Mediterranean fevers, and slight tonics or bitters af- terwards, are in geriei-al sufficient to conduct to a happy termination : whereas, in other and hotter re- gions, particularly in India, the use of mercurij, in addition to the means alluded to, is absolutely requi- site to secure^the biliary organs from obstruction or «In the Repulse, says Dr. B. Mr. Boyd reports that he had been very successful in combating it, [the