Practical observations on the venereal disease, and on the use of mercury / By Abraham Colles.

  • Colles, Abraham, 1773-1843.
Date:
1837
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Practical observations on the venereal disease, and on the use of mercury / By Abraham Colles. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    13/226 (page 1)
    = PRACTICAL OBSERVATIONS. PART TI. ON THE USE OF MERCURY IN VENEREAL COMPLAINTS. CHAPTER I. ON THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE VENEREAL DISEASE. Value of a knowledge of the natural history of this disease—Obstacles to our acquiring this knowledge—Order of symptoms—Mode in which this disease ultimately proves fatal—Secondary symptoms are capable of communicating this disease. That morbid like healthy action has its laws, and that disease in many of its apparently fickle changes and Protean forms is but proceeding in obedience to certain rules, are positions established by innumerable examples, and by convincing proofs; witness the progress of many fevers ; the whole history of small-pox; most of the eruptive or exanthematous diseases; the influence of vaccina- tion, &c. &c. These, and many other similar facts, have taught us that certain diseases appear to be under a certain influence as to the course they take, or as to the order in which their several symptoms appear, and that morbid poisons, in particular, excite a peculiar train of action, each producing one particular set of symptoms, and none other, and that these occur at regular periods, and pro- ceed in a certain regular order, in a sort of fixed succession ; and that in the constitution they infect, as well as in the part to which they are applied, they never fail to give rise to certain morbid processes, and to effect certain changes, which finally either lead to their own extinction, or to the destruction of the system, or of the part in which they have resided. When we reflect on these facts, and on the almost unerring certainty and undeviating regu- larity with which these occurrences take place, we must at once come to the conclusion, that to trace these laws, that is to expose the course and progress of disease, so as to be enabled, even before- hand, to predict the next symptom it will produce, must be a task not only truly interesting, but one of essential service in a practical