The nature of cholera investigated : with a supplemental chapter on treatment; addressed to junior practitioners / by John George French.

  • French, John George, 1804-1887.
Date:
1854
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The nature of cholera investigated : with a supplemental chapter on treatment; addressed to junior practitioners / by John George French. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

    106/168 (page 94)
    If, however, we look to the heart itself as the organ, the function of which is primarily impaired, we find an explanation of all the phenomena. No one regards small-pox or scarlet fever as diseases of the skin, but as some internal disorder which is beneficially eliminated on the surface, and these eruptions are more or less severe according to the severity with which the vital organs are threatened. It is, indeed, a fact, that but for the appearance of cutaneous phenomena the existence of these diseases would pass unobserved in many cases, so slight is the constitutional disturbance. No reason has, however, yet been suggested why a pustule occurs in the one case and an efflorescent rash in the other; but it is easy to explain why an irruption of fluid should proceed from the vessels into the alimentary canal if the power of the heart be diminished, because that is consistent with all that is known and observed in physiology: secretion ever attends congestion—that is, if the congestion be relieved; and it is by this process that the remarkable degree of relief which is aff'orded by elaterium, in certain structural diseases of the heart, is to be explained.