Essays on the most important diseases of women. Part 1, Puerperal fever; [and] On the method of induction and its results in medical science / by Robert Ferguson.

  • Ferguson, Robert, 1799-1865.
Date:
1839
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Essays on the most important diseases of women. Part 1, Puerperal fever; [and] On the method of induction and its results in medical science / by Robert Ferguson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    the lesions and symptoms of the other three, with this remarkable feature in addition, a tendency to fluid deposition in any or in every tissue. The fluids effused are blood, serum, pus and lymph. This last form has always excited the most attention, for it is the most frequent and the most fatal, and under circumstances of crowded hospitals, and misery and poverty, intractable to remedial measures. These four forms—the peritoneal, the gastro-ente- ric, the nervous, and the complicated, spring, as I shall endeavour to shew, from one source and cause. There is no trenchant limit which bounds them in nature j and in every epidemic which I have wit- nessed, the characteristics peculiar to any one are readily assumed by another. In the peritoneal form, the peritonitis ceases, and the patient succumbs under fever and diarrhoea—or under a complication of local effusions and phlegmasiee. In the gastro-enteric, sudden peritonitis will supervene, and carry off the patient in a few hours. Such also may occur in the third or nervous form, or it may (though it rarely does) terminate by a lengthened fever, or by deposit in the great cavities, or in the joints, the muscles or the eye-balls. It is the last form alone which is invariable, save in intensity. It may be looked on as a summary of the others, while these may be con- sidered as fragments of it. Although these various forms may and do run into each other, their tendency is to remain distinct;