On the treatment of pulmonary consumption by hygiene, climate, and medicine / by J. Henry Bennet.

  • Bennet, James Henry, 1816-1891.
Date:
1866
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the treatment of pulmonary consumption by hygiene, climate, and medicine / by J. Henry Bennet. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    ceptional opportunities for forming an opinion respecting the value of the treatment of pulmonary consumption pursued thirty years ago as compared with that now adopted by the leading authorities at home and abroad. My medical educa¬ tion was carried out partly in England, partly in Paris. During four years I was resident medical officer to several of the Paris hospitals, and there gave clinical lectures on auscultation (not then as generally studied as it is now) and on diseases^of the heart and lungs to several hundred young English and Ame¬ rican medical men. Thus I became thoroughly imbued with the knowledge of the day, and may add, that I have ever since remained much interested in thoracic pathology. Later in life, after practising many years in London, I became my¬ self affected with pulmonary consumption, and, seven years ago, had to abandon everything in order to go and die, as I thought, on the shores of the Mediterranean. Relieved from the fatigue, the harass, and the cares of our arduous profes¬ sion, I have managed, by the application of modern science, to save my own life, and since then I have helped to save the lives of many similarly affected who have followed me in my health-exile to the south. The great fact to which I have to testify is, that pulmonary consumption is a curable disease—indeed, in its early stages, often avery curable disease—under proper treatment. In making this assertion, I have merely to enlarge, and to confirm by matured knowledge, an unpublished paper written in 1840, entitled “ On the Curability of Consumption,” which I recently found among my manuscripts. At that date I had just passed a year as one of the resident medical officers of the Salpetriere, a large asylum hospital in Paris, more especially devoted to aged and infirm women. There I had found in the dead room, in the lungs of women who had died in advanced life from other diseases, large cretaceous deposits and puckered cartilaginous cicatrices, which proved, emphatically, undeniably, that they