Papers relative to the disease called cholera spasmodica in India, now prevailing in the North of Europe / Printed by authority of the Lords of His Majesty's Most Honourable Privy Council.

  • Great Britain. Privy Council.
Date:
1831
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Papers relative to the disease called cholera spasmodica in India, now prevailing in the North of Europe / Printed by authority of the Lords of His Majesty's Most Honourable Privy Council. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    legs, thighs, and loins; but we have not seen general tetanus, nor even trismus. There is occasionally a low, suffering whine. The secretion of urine is always totally suspended, nor have we observed tears shed under these circumstances; vomiting and purging, which are far from being the most important or dan¬ gerous symptoms, and which, in a very great number of cases of the present epidemic have not been profuse, generally cease, or are arrested by medicine easily in the attack. Frictions remove the blue colour for a time from the part rubbed; but in other parts, parti¬ cularly the face, the livor becomes every moment more intense and more general. The lips and cheeks some¬ times puff out and flap, in expiration, with a white froth between them, as in apoplexy. If blood be obtained in this state, it is black, flows by drops, is thick, and feels to the finger colder than natural. Towards the close of this scene, the respiration becomes very slow, there is a quivering among the tendons of the wrist, the mind remains entire. The patient is first unable to swallow, then becomes insensible; there never is, however, any rattle in the throat, and he dies quietly after a long, convulsive sob or two. The above is a faint description of the very worst kind of case, dying, in the cold stage, in from six to twenty-four hours after the setting in of the bad symp¬ toms. We have seen many such cases just carried to the hospital from their homes or their barracks. In by far the greater number vomiting had ceased, in some, however, it was still going on, and invariably of the true serous kind. Many confessed that they had con¬ cealed a diarrhoea for a day or two ; others had been suddenly seized, generally very early in the morning.