Volume 1

Researches into the causes, nature, and treatment of the more prevalent diseases of India, and of warm climates generally. Illustrated with cases, post mortem examinations, and numerous coloured engravings of morbid structures / by James Annesley.

  • Annesley, James, Sir, 1780-1847.
Date:
1828
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Researches into the causes, nature, and treatment of the more prevalent diseases of India, and of warm climates generally. Illustrated with cases, post mortem examinations, and numerous coloured engravings of morbid structures / by James Annesley. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    although disease has certain characters to-day, it may have very different characters on some other occasion, according as the nature of its causes may vary, and as the circumstances more immediately related with the patient may change. Practitioners whose experience of the diseases of warm climates has been limited to those who, like themselves, have recently arrived from a cold country, possessed of a phlogistic diathesis and plethoric habit of body, heightened by living on salted animal food and a liberal use of spirits, per¬ ceiving vascular action increased, and even tumultuous, most properly deplete their patients, and find their practice successful. Elated with success, and without considering that the character of the disease and the issue of the practice are the result of the particular circumstances of the patients, they become prone to contend that the fevers and diseases of the country are of the same nature with those which they have observed in the narrow sphere of their experience, and are to be cured by the same means which they have practised. / Other practitioners have observed the diseases of intertropical countries under other or almost opposite circumstances, and owing to those circum¬ stances, in connexion with an essential difference in the nature of the causes productive of these diseases, have been led to employ a method of cure very different from that now alluded to. They write on the diseases of warm climates, and, as they conceive, from experience. As an account merely of what they had themselves seen in the particular field in which they were labourers, their observations would have been valuable; but when they generalise from the very limited data they have obtained, and assert that what was true as respects what came before themselves, under particular influences and circumstances, must be true also of all that has been observed, or will be observed in future, — they may influence the inex¬ perienced and insufficiently informed, but they will never command the assent of the practitioner, who, taking nature as his guide, follows the dictates of his own judgment, and endeavours to found his views of diseased actions, whether observed between the tropics or in the temperate zones, upon the