A treatise on fever, or, Selections from a course of lectures on fever : being part of a course of theory and practice of medicine / delivered by Robert D. Lyons.

  • Lyons, Robert Spencer Dyer, 1826-1886.
Date:
1861
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A treatise on fever, or, Selections from a course of lectures on fever : being part of a course of theory and practice of medicine / delivered by Robert D. Lyons. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    one, or, it may liave been, more visitations of tliis fatal jK-stilence, so long ineradicably domesticated amongst its. Since tin* national devastation which Resulted from the protracted and exhausting wars of the sixteenth and seventcentli centuries, the epidemic recurrence of fevers would seem to have assumed a more fixed and determined periodicity. Thus, for the last two hundred yean*, almost every quarter of a century has been signalised by a more or less fatal invasion of these di-eases. Indeed, so nearly fixed and definable seem the laws which govern the movements of the great epidemics of this country, that we can almost with certainty predict their return, like that of some ill-omened meteor of the olden time. And cxj>eriencc of the past shows us, that it is far from an improbable prediction, that ere a score or two of years shall have passed over our heads, we may be again called upon to combat a jwstilence as wide-spread and as futal, as that which will ever make the last decades of our social history remarkable. Our own century has already witnessed not less than three epidemic visita- tions of first-class magnitude and fatality. Let us take a glance at the numerical results which the reports and investigations of the Census Commis- sioners of Ireland have brought to the illustration of this subject. You will see that it is not only in the last decade that fever has had a large share in raising the per-ccntage of our mortality to an alarming height. According to the census of 1841, the total deaths from fever in the ten years then elapsed, or the decade 1831-1841, readied the enormous number of 112,072. Large, however, as these figures art', we find that