Lectures and essays on fevers and diphtheria, 1849 to 1879 / by Sir William Jenner.

Date:
1893
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Lectures and essays on fevers and diphtheria, 1849 to 1879 / by Sir William Jenner. 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.

    19/614
    ON TYPHOID AND TYPHUS FEVEES^ INTRODUCTION. It is beyond dispute that there are large groups of diseases arranged under the same heads in systematic works on medi- cine, of which the only bonds of union are, that their nature is unknown, and that they present in common certain pretty constant and striking symptoms. Of these ill-defined anomalous groups, continued fever is one of the most remarkable and important. To trace the relations, and to detect the diflt'erences of the incongruous mass of diseases united together under this name, only the most careful analysis of daily recorded clinical observations can suffice. The memory is too treacherous to be depended on in the science of medicine, in which the effects of primary are com- plicated by the effects of secondary lesions, and in which observation has to be corrected by observation. For the elucidation of its obscurer points, no loose or general statements are of use—the most rigid induction can alone avail. It would be a great point gained towards the right under- standing of the true value of the differences observed in cases known as continued fever, if the question raised by Louis could be positively answered—no matter whether in the affirmative or negative—as to the identity of typhus and typhoid fevers; that is to say, have or have not British physicians confounded under the term continued fever, two 1 Published in the Edinburgh Monthly Journal of the Medical Sciences, 1849-50.