A prize essay on bilious fever / by Lunsford P. Yandell.

  • Yandell, Lunsford P. (Lunsford Pitts), 1805-1878.
Date:
1841
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A prize essay on bilious fever / by Lunsford P. Yandell. 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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    in this, as in local ulcerations attendant upon typhus, the local lesion is secondary. We might as well argue that the pustules were the cause of the symptoms in one case, as to say that the ulceration of the intestines was the cause of the other.* Finally; the well known effect of bark in intermittent fe- ver seems to me fatal to the doctrine of the physiological school. If we possess in any remedy a specific for any dis- order, it is this article in recent cases of ague and fever. And yet bark is a tonic, a stimulant, and in genuine gastritis would be as mischievous, as in intermittent fever it is known to be salutary. How is it to be explained, that recent and acute gastritis is subdued by a remedy proved to be per- nicious in other phlegmasia? ? I confess that the analogies cited by Broussais and his followers do not strike me as true. Chronic opthalmia, diarrhoea, and blennorrhagia, caused by stimulants, bear little resemblance to the inflammation that occurs during the progress of fever in the mucous membrane of the stomach. The true account of the phenomena appears then, to be, that the repetition and excessive amount of the local conges- tions occurring in the cold stage of fevers, give rise to a hy- pergemic condition of the affected organs. This condition, frequently excited, leads, at last, to local inflammations. New local inflammations are set up in various organs, and these, which, in the beginning, were only the effect of the disease, become, by reacting on the system, the cause of its continu- ance.t And hence, it appears, that in almost all cases of fe- ver, there is a combination of the essential and the sympa- thetic fevers—the essential, the result of the first cause—the impress of malaria upon the nervous system—and the sym- pathetic, the result of the local lesions which arise during its course. So that, in the treatment of this disease, we are to bear in mind, not only the phenomena which seem to grow out of a general disturbance of the nervous system, but those *Stokes. Od. cit. p. 414. +Ib.