The practice of medicine : a text-book for practitioners and students with special reference to diagnosis and treatment / by James Tyson.

  • Tyson, James, 1841-1919.
Date:
1896
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The practice of medicine : a text-book for practitioners and students with special reference to diagnosis and treatment / by James Tyson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    after his return to America had the opportunity, in conjunction with Pennock, of studying the disease in the wards of the Philadelphia Hos- pital in the spring and summer of 1836, and of contrasting it with typhus fever, of which there was an epidemic then prevalent in Philadelphia. These two observers were the first to point out the distinctive features of the two diseases in the American Journal of the Medical Sciences in 1837: Their publications were followed in 1838 by a paper by James Jackson. Sr., entitled Report on Typhoid Fever, and another by Enoch Hale On the Typhoid Fever of New England, which probably had their impulse in the knowledge furnished by the younger Jackson to his father on his return from Paris. Thus it came to pass that Elisha Bartlett's work on the Diagnosis and Treatment of Typhus and Typhoid Fever,- an American text-book published in 1842, contained the first separate description of the diseases. For up to 1838 only typhoid fever was known in Paris. At this time Alfred Stille, who had been the house physician of Gerhard and Pennock in the Philadelphia Hospital and had learned there the dis- tinctive features of typhus and typhoid, went to Paris and in 1838 read a paper before the Socicte mcdicalc d' Observation, pointing out the differ- ences between the two diseases. George C. Shattuck had been similarly trained in Boston and contributed a paper to the same Society. Shattuck also went to London at Louis' request, and at the Fever Hospital there saw the two distinct affections, on which he reported to the Society on his return to Paris.* He insisted on the existence of two fevers in England. In Germany, J. V. Hildenbrand had pointed out differences between typhoid and typhus as early as 1810, but also regarded them as varieties of the same disease and not distinct diseases. These views were main- tained for many years in Germany, but since 1859, at least, correct notions have prevailed. In Great Britain, in 1835, Peebles of Glasgow, who had observed the rubeoloid eruption in the contagious typhus of Italy, pointed it out to Drs. R. Perry and A. P. Stewart. The former, according to Stewart, was the first to contend for the difference between the erup- tions of typhus and typhoid. His writings as quoted by Murchison do not show this. Stewart, however, separated the two affections in a paper published in i840.f In England it was not until 1849—51 that Sir William Jenner| clearly demonstrated their difference, and about the same time definite ideas were arrived at in France. Since 1850 the two diseases have been everywhere recognized and described as distinct and separate except in Germany,where the recognition came a few years later. § Etiology.—The bacillus to which prevailing views ascribe typhoid fever was discovered by Eberth in 1880 in the intestine of a case of the disease. This observation was promptly confirmed by Klebs, Eppinger, Koch, von Meyer, Friedlander, Gaffky, and others, who found it in the intestines, lymphatic system, including the mesenteric glands and spleen, *Amer. Med. Examiner, February l, March, 1840. f Edinburgh Med. and Surg. Jour., April, 1840. % Jenner, Med. Chir. Trans., Vol. XXXIII; Edinburgh Mo. Jour, of Med. Sci., Vols. IX and X, 1849-1851 ; Med. Times, Vols. XX-xxin, November, 1849, to March, 1851. § For an interesting and very much fuller historical sketch of the development of our knowledge of typhoid fever, see Murchison's treatise on the Continued Fevers of Great Britain, 3d ed., London, 1884.