An essay on intermittent and bilious remittent fevers : with their pathological relation to ozone / by E. S. Gaillard, M.D.

  • Gaillard, E. S. (Edwin Samuel), 1827-1885.
Date:
1856
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An essay on intermittent and bilious remittent fevers : with their pathological relation to ozone / by E. S. Gaillard, M.D. 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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    s therapeutic convenience, should not. on this account, be consid- ered as distinct specialties; for most of our modern authorities would find the relative exposition of their opinions In the words of him who defines Intermittent the type; Remittent Fever as a manifestation of the aggravation, or modification of the type. Before, however, stating the abundant reasons why these Fevers may thus together be treated, it would be more relevant in an introduction to the subject, first to speak of the great class which claims them as a sub-division. In doing so, il will be only to repeat what every student has felt and every writer dwelt upon—the impossibility of defining the long catalogue of symptoms which uniformly should be present, to constitute thai peculiar condition of the system, to which has been given the generic term, Fever. The failure of The Great Scotch- man in such an attempt, and after him (we would almost say necessarily) a host of others, proves the obscurity of the subject and difficulty of the task. It has been a professional search after the Philosopher's stone—a futile attempt ex fumo dare lucem. Cullen, in meaning, regards Fever as a cold stage, succeeded by a hot and then a sweating stage. Now. as we may have the hot without the cold stag-, and the sweating without either; or again, any one stage, neither preceded nor followed by its correlative, it is clear that there can nol be the least claim to a definition of that state, whose phenomena are all to be classed under the word in question, and all on which his warmest admirers may insist is, that he has furnished the most correct description which had ever previously been given of the subject—the least proof of interruption, or anomaly in his stages, transforms the definition into a description. Fever has never been elucidated by the records, or researches of Mor- bid Anatomy; and at present we have no better definition than that of Fordyce's, that Fever is a disease affecting the whole system. We have, of course, all the evidences in these Fevers which characterize Idiopathic Fevers generally—remission, and still more remarkably, intermission—in those uniform and pecu- liar effects which, never to an incidental, can only be attributed to a specific cause: the frequency of pulse, as vitally affecting our prognosis, (so entirely the reverse in the Symptomatic Fevers,) and lastly, that sub. and sometimes defibrination of