Essays on the most important diseases of women. Part 1, Puerperal fever; [and] On the method of induction and its results in medical science / by Robert Ferguson.

  • Ferguson, Robert, 1799-1865.
Date:
1839
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Essays on the most important diseases of women. Part 1, Puerperal fever; [and] On the method of induction and its results in medical science / by Robert Ferguson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    and it is a remarkable fact, that the one or the oth6r of these will give the character to a whole epidemic; the rest either totally disappearing, or appearing only rarely. It is this which has caused so much confusion and dispute in the history of opinions on puerperal fever. Each author has assumed the form he witnessed as the only one, to the exclusion of all the rest. Hence, too, the discrepancy in the treatment of this malady. Gordon, and Armstrong, and Hey, saw, for the most part, the peritoneal form. William Hunter, Lovvder, and the elder Hey, observed chiefly the complicated form, where the whole constitution was sinking; under numerous at- tacks, simultaneously made, on the most distant organs in every grade of intensity. Richter and Butter witnessed epidemics, in which the gastro- enteric form predominated, and in which the dis- ordered secretions were remedied by ipecacuanha or alkalies, followed by stimulants. Another source of dispute and confusion is trace- able to another remarkable phenomenon of puerperal fever—the variation in intensity of any of the peculiar forms. In one epidemic the peritoneal affection is very readily removed, in another the same practice fails to remedy apparently similar evils. The French . government, for example, rewarded Doulcet for his method of treating a most fatal epidemic puerperal fever, and ordered his plan to be circulated over the kingdom, which, being tried the following year, . B 2