Memoir of the life and medical opinions of John Armstrong : To which is added an inquiry into the facts connected with those forms of fever attributed to malaria or marsh effluvium / By Francis Boott.

  • Boott, Francis, 1792-1863.
Date:
1833-1834
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Memoir of the life and medical opinions of John Armstrong : To which is added an inquiry into the facts connected with those forms of fever attributed to malaria or marsh effluvium / By Francis Boott. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    puerperal peritonitis and what is called in the above extract from the Edinburgh Journal, the low malignant puerperal fever, but that which depended upon the nature of the exciting cause. He considered that in all cases of parturient women there was a predisposition to peritoneal inflamma- tion, and that this might be developed by the com- mon, or the peculiar exciting causes of fever. If the disease arose from a local contamination of air, as in the crowded wards of a hospital; or from a general distemperature of atmosphere, as in ex- amples of its epidemic prevalence in private prac- tice, especially among the poor of cities,—he looked upon it as a specific fever, as typhus, in fact, com- bined with the local inflammation to which the patient was peculiarly predisposed: and those cases in which from the first the pulse was soft and com- pressible, and the heat on the surface not above the natural standard, he considered as almost inevi- tably fatal. But when the pulse was strong, and the heat high, he believed that the case was gene- rally as much under the controul of decisive vene- section, when it arose from a peculiar, as from a common cause. His practice in this, as in most inflammatory diseases, was modified eventually by his discovery of the advantages arising from the free use of opium after full depletion ; so that to- wards the close of his life he did not exhibit calo- mel as freely as formerly, though he always used it in the specific form of the disease. The critic I have already quoted, in speaking of the work on puerperal fever, says This essay- is well written and well arranged. It contains much