Anaesthesia, or the employment of chloroform and ether in surgery, midwifery, etc / by J.Y. Simpson.

  • Simpson, James Young, 1811-1870.
Date:
1849
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Anaesthesia, or the employment of chloroform and ether in surgery, midwifery, etc / by J.Y. Simpson. 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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    all its destructive particles.* He elsewhere eloquently declaims against affectionate parents being robbed of their serenity, and the minds of tender mothers being wrung with eternal sus- pense, whilst a few projectors or visionists are pursuing their deleterious projects on human victims, and perpetrating, a dangerous innovation which so many fatal facts illustrate.! Mr. Lipscomb urgently maintained, in an essay on small-pox inoculation published in 1805, that cow-pox, the new scourge industriously dispersed to afflict the children of men, is some- times fatal of itself, and that the diseases introduced or brought into action by it may be also sometimes fatal, and can never be completely guarded against.J One author had seen numerous instances of vaccination producing eruptions, remaining, for months and even years afterwards, undermining the constitu- tion, and very frequently terminating in phagedenic or corroding ulcers. And he had likewise witnessed coughs, dyspnoea, hectic marasmus, tedious and difficult to eradicate, &c, result from cow-pox. Shocking reflection (he adds) to a humane mind, that a poison should thus be introduced into the human constitution without the plea of necessity, or the support of reason and experience.^ Several children, observes Dr. Moseley, have died from diseases brought on by the cow-pox where no ulcerations had appeared, and others have lost their nails and ends of their fingers, several months after the inocu- lation. || My accounts from the country are (he continues) full of dismal histories of ulcerated arms and mortifications.^ Blindness (it was averred), lameness and deformity had been the result of employing the vaccine in innumerable instances, and its fatal venom had removed many an infant untimely from the world.** Nay, it was strenuously maintained and believed, that not only were various old maladies, peculiar to man, thus excited into action by the cow-pox poison, but that different new diseases peculiar to the cow were sometimes communicated to the human constitution by vaccination. Various beastly diseases, writes Dr. Rowley, common to cattle, have ap- peared among the human species since the introduction of cow-pox, cow-pox mange, cow-pox abscess, cow-pox ulcer, * Cow-pock Inoculation; with the Modes of treating the Beastly new Diseases produced by the Cow-pock. 2d edition, 1805. P. 14. + Ibid. p. 128. t Inoculation for the Small-pox vindicated, &c, 1805. P. 40. § Observations addressed to the Public on the Cow-pox, pointing out the dread- ful consequences of this new Disease, so recently and rashly introduced into the Human Constitution. By R. Squirrel!, M.D., 1805. Pp. 16, 17. || Treatise on the Lues Bovilla, p. 118. 1 Ibid. p. 92. ** Moore's History of Vaccination, p. 39.