Remarks on the theory and treatment of scarlet fever : with brief notices of the disease as it prevailed epidemically at Bridlington, in 1831 / by Humphry Sandwith.

Date:
1835
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Remarks on the theory and treatment of scarlet fever : with brief notices of the disease as it prevailed epidemically at Bridlington, in 1831 / by Humphry Sandwith. 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 scarlet fever,” he observes, “ was generally accompanied by a severe affection of the throat; which, in many cases, continued to harass the patient after the usual term of the fever had elapsed, and, in several children, appeared to be the prin- cipal cause of the fatality of the disease. The sim- ple rash, which yields readily to the cool treatment with little medicine, was seldom seen during this epidemic ; and the period when cold washing seemed to be essentially remedial, was soon over.” Dr. Hamilton tells us, that “the mortality was great” in the epidemic scarlatina of Edinburgh in 1804.* “ Dr. Lehman has published, in the twenty- second volume of Rust’s Magazine, a memoir, in which he observes, that an epidemic scarlatina prevailed at Torgau, in 1825, of so violent a cha- racter, that one in eight of those afflicted with it died, and that thirty patients, all of tender age, fell victims to it.”f Proofs of the occasional malignity of the disease might easily be multiplied; but these may suffice to correct any false impression, derived from the not less true, but opposite, accounts of its fatality, by Sydenham, Macgregor,{ Dr. Carbutt,|| Mr. Alcock, and others. The truth seems to be that, as Dr. Heberden has stated, “ this distemper is sometimes so slight * Hamilton on Purgatives, p. 62. t Dewees’s Practice of Physic, vol. i-, p. 225. x Vide Macgregor’s Report of the Principal Natural Diseases amongst the Children of the Royal Military Asylum at Chelsea. The mortality was six in 131, or about one in twenty, Med. Chir. Trans., vol. v., p. 441. . || North of England Med. and Surg. Journal, vol. i., p. 27. J