A guide for self preservation, and parental affection, or, Plain directions for enabling people to keep themselves and their children free from several common disorders / by Thomas Beddoes.

  • Beddoes, Thomas, 1760-1808.
Date:
[1793?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A guide for self preservation, and parental affection, or, Plain directions for enabling people to keep themselves and their children free from several common disorders / by Thomas Beddoes. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

    17/24 (page 17)
    ( *7 ) and flout are difpofedto ftrong inflammations, but the old and feeble to diforders of an oppofite kind. But it does not always happen that a cold, or a pleurify (which may be confidered as a cold of the moft violent kind) is brought on by having the body firft cooled or wet, and then heated by a fire or ftrong liquors. An inflammatory fore throat, an inflammation of the bowels, the croup in children, or the rheumatifm may be the confe- quence, according as this or that part may happen at the time to be difpofed to inflammation. I have known a labouring man in a hard fro ft come home perifhing with cold. He has immediately flown to the fire, kept clofe by it till he went to bed, and in the mean time drank a quantity of hot ale. By morning he has had a rheumatic fever, which, beingdll treated, has left him a cripple for life. And if being too fuddenly heated can in- flame a frozen limb till it mortifies, why may not heat, incautioufly applied, produce that lefs vio- lent inflammation, which takes place in rheumatic fever ? That pains of the limbs accompanied with fever, are a&ually produced when a perfon goes oiit of cold into heat, is a matter afeertained by very careful experiment. One Richard Edwards of Liverpool, an healthy man, twenty-eight years of age, with black hair and a ruddy complexion, went into fome frefh water, which was about the temperature of mild weather in winter, viz. at 40° by the thermometer. He continued in this water thirty-four minutes,' and then went into a w^arm bath at 90 degrees, that is, rather below blood heat—Here for the firft moments he felt warm, but his hands and feet were pained, and in two mi- nutes, being flill in the warm water, he fell into a very violent fhiver. Tfie water wasnow heated 6 degrees, that is, it was made as warmas blood, but Edwards ftill felt cold ; he remained in the warm water about half an hour and the heat was increafed