The Goulstonian lectures on puerperal fever : delivered at the Royal College of Physicians, London / by Robert J. Lee.

  • Lee, Robert James, 1793-1877.
Date:
1875
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The Goulstonian lectures on puerperal fever : delivered at the Royal College of Physicians, London / by Robert J. Lee. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

    11/64 (page 5)
    wife of Dromeades, having been delivered of a female child, and all other matters progressing favourably, on the second day after was seized with rigor and acute fever. She began to have pain in the hypo- chondrium and nausea ; was incoherent and sleepless for many hours ; respiration was long and irregular, and she suffered from thirst, cold sweats, and epistaxis. On the sixth day, she expired. The third case is that of a woman who “ was seized with fever soon after the birth of a son. At first, there was thirst, nausea, and cardialgia; the tongue was dry, the bowels disordered; she had slight rigor, acute fever, and a faint cold sweat about the head. On the third day, she was in great pain, and there was diarrhoea ; on the fourth day, she had rigors again, and all the symptoms were increased in severity. They continued with slight variation till she died with epistaxis on the four- teenth day.” {Op. cit., p. 987.) Some remarks on the conditions of the atmosphere which existed at the time of the occurrence of this case contain the observation that erysipelas, in a malignant and non-malignant form, was prevalent. There is generally some reason for the introduction of such a fact as this, which is left to the reader to explain as he pleases. The way in which Hippocrates quietly mentions it without remark, still leaves the impression that he had noticed a connection between atmospheric conditions and the occurrence of certain diseases which he could not explain. There is another important case, which is compared by the com- mentators with that of the wife of Philinus. The symptoms are re- garded as very typical in both instances of the consequences of arrested lochia : a theory, I need hardly mention, which satisfied the minds of the physicians of that day, and indeed for centuries later. But I do not mention this case, which commences tv ®&oip rtjv KaraKiifiivi)v, etc. {op. cit., p. 1096), for any other reason beyond the fact that, during the period of eighty days of illness terminating in death, we have those symptoms detailed which clearly mark the case as one of phlebitis or inflammation of the cellular tissue of the right limb. The woman was attacked on the third day after delivery with the usual symptoms of puerperal fever, such as were mentioned in the other cases I have related. On or a little after the twentieth day, the symptoms of phlebitis commenced, and the febrile variations which are so commonly met with in this form of disease are simply and clearly stated; they were of a wandering and paroxysmal character {■n(it\avT]fiivm Se irapo^uvofx.tvoi), which exactly describes them.