Lectures on the study of fever / by Alfred Hudson.

  • Hudson, Alfred, 1808-1880.
Date:
1868
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Lectures on the study of fever / by Alfred Hudson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    As the blood diffuses its atoms into every minute space of the system, the diastaltic spinal system extends its in- fluence over every one of these atoms. The blood under- goes its changes in the methematous or blood changing (or capillary) channels, placed between the alternate branches of the arteries, and the incipient roots of the veins; to the same point the diastaltic spinal system extends its wondrous influence. In accordance with this, we find those functions deranged in fever which, like animal heat, are the product of the joint influence of these factors; and we find, moreover, that such derangements will vary in amount with the extent to which the nervous system, or the blood, or the molecular nutrition of an organ may be severally affected. Of these derangements, the first usually to attract notice is diminution of nervo-muscular force. Even in the most insidious cases, this has been observed in the form of mental hebetude or dulness and bodily languor, dizziness, feelings of fatigue, depressed spirits, irritability of tem- per, or increased sensibility to external impressions, such as light, sound, and temperature. Even at this early period the respiration is disturbed, laboured breathing being a very early symptom, owing, probably, in part to the diminished tonicity of the right ventricle, but chiefly to the influence of the fever-poison upon the eighth pair of nerves. Most, if not all these symptoms, may be usually observed before the commencement of the stage of reaction; and in some rare cases, in which either the blood has been subjected to the action of an unusually intense poison, or the ner- vous system has been depressed by some severe shock or strong emotion, fever has begun and ended with these symptoms, the stage of reaction never having succeeded