On mixed types of fever in relation to the question of the identity or non-identity of typus and typhoid poisons / by Henry Kennedy.

  • Kennedy, Henry.
Date:
1866
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On mixed types of fever in relation to the question of the identity or non-identity of typus and typhoid poisons / by Henry Kennedy. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    i derstand why the work of Hass has been so utterly ignored. He saw fevers on a very large scale, and his work is written in a calm and dispassionate spirit, and yet not an attempt has been made, as far as I know, to answer his arguments or overturn his facts. Surely, in such a widespread dis¬ ease as fever, no one is justified in asserting that what they have seen is what must have been seen by others. We know that even in the type of fever familiar to us as typhus, very great differences exist, and may be constantly seen when the disease attacks several members of the same family. In one, the head symptoms are all in the ascen¬ dant ; in a second, the chest will be the part attacked; whilst in a third, it will be the stomach in the form known as gastric fever. Or, again, as regards the spots, the hus¬ band will present them and the wife not, or the parents will have them and the children not; or it may be the con¬ verse of this. In a family named Bright, of whom eight were in hospital at the same time, and who were sent in by Dr. Carte of the Royal Hospital, the children were all spotted, whilst the mother had none, though she had a very severe attack of fever. Again, in three sisters, all adults, who were recently in hospital, only one had the regular spots of the disease; in the other two anything of rash was most indistinct ; one of these latter died. Fur¬ ther still, in the great epidemic of 1847-48, the fever was what is known, and had been described previously, as the relapsing fever; that is, it was made up of two parts. There was a sharp attack of fever running on for five or seven days; then a lull of one, two, or three days; and again an onset of fever, usually much severer than the first, and, in very many cases, attended by spots. No one, I think, could have any doubt but that it was one and the same poison which caused the two attacks; and yet, in all the recent and standard works on fever, the relapsing one is described as if it were a totally different fever from typhus, and caused by a different poison. I cannot give in my adhesion to this opinion, for I have as strong a con¬ viction as the nature of the subject admits that the poison of typhus generates not only the type of fever known as