Report on yellow fever / by James Gillkrest.

  • Gillkrest, J. (James), -1853.
Date:
1852
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Report on yellow fever / by James Gillkrest. 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.

    9/119 (page 141)
    Remittent Ti/pe. Let us listen to wlmt tlie experience of Dr. Elliotson, of St. Thomas’s Hospital, had taught him on the subject of remit- tents :— . “ Remittent fever will frequently occur _ insidiously, and, unless you are quite up to it, you may as easily pass it oyer as some forms of epilepsy. I have had many cases of remittent fever, which, in addition to the symptoms of continued fever, were merely characterized by excessive sweating.’ London Medical Gazette, January 3, 1831. Those therefore cannot, with justice, be accused of much inaccuracy 'nvIio, confining themselves probably to their own field of observation, have looked upon Yellow Fever as belong- ing to the class of continued fevers ; but it is important to show whether those are right who maintain that the disease bears no affinity whatever to remittents, and that it never assumes any other than the continued form. On this point it will be right to quote authorities of respect- ability. Dr. Rush, in his account of the epidemics at Phila- delphia in 1793 and 1794, distinctly notices remissions in several pages:—‘‘The remissions were more evident in this than in the common bilious fever. They generally occurred in the afternoon.”* * * § “ It,” speaking of delirium, “ alternated in some cases with the exacerbations and remissions of the fever.”f Speaking of the second form of this, fever, he says that it was attended “with obvious remissions.At p. 45 of his account of the e^iidemic of 1794, he says that the disease “ appeared most frequently in the form of a remittent. The exacerbations occurred most commonly in the evening.” In another passage, often quoted, “Never has the unity of our autumnal fever been more clearly demonstrated than in our present epidemic. Its principal grades, viz., the intermittent, the mild remittent, the inflammatory bilious fever, and the malignant Yellow Fever, have all run into each other in many instances. A tertian has ended in death with black vomiting, and a fever, with the face and eyes suffused with blood, has ended in a quotidian which has yielded to a few doses of bark.”§ Dr, .John Hunter in his Observations on the Diseases of the Army in Jamaica, 1796, p. 62, says, “ The fevers that prevail in Jamaica are either of the intermittent or remittent kind. The remittent fevers are both the most frequent and the most fatal.” At p. 63 he describes the ordinary symptoms; and at p.^ .318 he says, “ When the remittent fever is of the worst kind the yellowness of the skin occurs most frequently ; but * Account of Epidemic of 1793, p. 79. + Op. cit., p. 62. X Ibid., p. 82. § Letter to Dr. Miller, New York Medical Repository, ■vol. vi., p. 249.