Observations on the nature of malignant cholera, with a view to establish correct principles of its prevention and treatment : drawn up at the request of the Westminster Medical Society / by A.P.W. Philip.

Date:: 1832

Credit: Observations on the nature of malignant cholera, with a view to establish correct principles of its prevention and treatment : drawn up at the request of the Westminster Medical Society / by A.P.W. Philip. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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$the symptoms with which this disease makes its attack, equally with those which follow it, prove the injurious im- * pression to be made on that system ? In considering the nature of the disease,, we must keep in view the more severe cases* where the impression of the offending cause is less powerful, it necessarily acts more in the way of more ordinary causes of injury, and its effects are various, being influenced by the particular constitution of the patient and other occasional circum- stances, which have no influence on the more powerful impression. Thus, in the former instance, fever, inflammatory affections or partial congestions arise. It is when its cause is so powerful as to set at defiance the influence of all other concurrent causes, that the disease assumes one uniform character, which unfolds its real nature. The following I regard as the great peculiarity of this disease, when exquisitely formed, in which it differs from all other diseases with which we are acquainted ; I have been at much pains, both in my Inquiry into the Law's of the Vital Functions, and in a paper published in the Philosophical Transactions of 1829, to shew that except where death is occasioned by an extreme and sudden injury of the sensorial or nervous system, in which case all the po\Vers of life are instantly extinguished, I say that these cases excepted, in all the modes of death with which wTe were acquainted, the sensorial functions are always the first which cease, but here these and the nervous functions, as in instantaneous death, cease together, the former only ceasing in consequence of the total failure of the functions of the nervous system. Hence it is that the mental powers remain to the last; the cause of the disease making its impression on the nervous system alone, and the sensorial having no direct dependance on the nervous power. Were it not that it would too much protract this part of the subject, I could offer a striking illustration of all that has been said, by comparing the results of the experiments$