Lectures on fever : delivered in the Memphis Medical College in 1853-6 / by A.P. Merrill.

  • A. P. Merrill
Date:
1865
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Lectures on fever : delivered in the Memphis Medical College in 1853-6 / by A.P. Merrill. 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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    some morbid product—some diseased quality or ad- mixture of the blood—the existence of which could not, of course, be proved. The humoral pathology, therefore, was a mere hypothesis, founded wholly upon an assumption of facts, and if there was some truth in it, as is now contended by many, it was wholly accidental. In the then state of physiological and chemical knowledge, and without the means of analyzing the blood and other fluids of the body, there was no possibility of constructing a reliable or even an intelligible theory of fever, upon any scheme of huinoralism; nor have modern investigations afforded us much assistance in this respect, in the establish- ment of undoubted facts. But the hypothesis has had an influence, both in ancient and modern times, in favor of a negative or expectant treatment of fever, relying mainly upon the powers of nature to effect a cure. It is remarkable, that among all the able men who wrote upon fever, the solids of the body should not have been mentioned as having any agency in its phenomena, until the hypothesis of disordered inner- vation was called into view by Stahl and Hoffman, who substituted a spasm of the capillary vessels for the thickened blood and the error loci of Boerhaave; and this idea seems to have been seized upon by Cul- len, without considering that there was no more proof of the existence of spasm than of a diseased