An essay on the venereal diseases which have been confounded with syphilis, and the symptoms which exclusively arise from that poison : illustrated by drawings of the cutaneous eruptions of true syphilis, and the resembling diseases / by Richard Carmichael.

  • Carmichael, Richard, 1779-1849.
Date:
1814
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An essay on the venereal diseases which have been confounded with syphilis, and the symptoms which exclusively arise from that poison : illustrated by drawings of the cutaneous eruptions of true syphilis, and the resembling diseases / by Richard Carmichael. 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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    CANADIAN DISEASE. » go called on account of the resemblance of its smell to hemlock,) but we are afterwards informed, that none were cured radically without mercury, and that it is necessary to continue that medicine three weeks after aU symptoms have disappeared.* From the whole of the information to be derived from the imperfect ac count of this disease in Doctor Swediaur's work, I should be inclmed to infer, that like the yaws and sivvens, it is capable of yielding to the powers of the constitution, and that mercury is only of service, when the disease is on the decline, and has begun to yield to those powers. For if that medicine was capable of curing the disease, with the same certainty as attends its employment in syphiHs, we should not find those vegetable remedies resorted to in the first instance, which, according to Mr. Bowman's account, greatly forwarded the recovery of the patients j yet it seems they were not radically cured without the assistance of mercury, although m another place, we are informed that some affected with the disease, recovered without the aid of that medicine. However, the circumstances detailed, I conceive, afford sufficient grounds to conclude, that the Canadian disease is not syphilitic, but that it is ano- ther instance of a contagious malady which commences with ulceration, and is followed by bubo, eruptions and ulcers of the skin, pains, nodes, and caries of the bones. A train of symptoms very generally supposed to appertain exclusively to the syphilitic poison, but which, as I hope to con- Vince my reader, may derive their origin from primary ulcers which are not syphilitic, and are still more common in this country than syphilis it- self. The organs of generation are subject to a variety of ulcers, destitute of the chara^cteristics of chancre—the hardened edge and base; yet most practitioners look on them as chancres, and treat them as such, imagining « Practical Obserrations on Venereal Complaints, p. 169.