Febrile disease

“ It is employed principally in typhoid fever, on the theory that a condition of high fever is in itself a source of danger quite distinct from the other injurious effects of a febrile disease. On the other hand, the employment of high degrees of heat has of late been shown to be a potent agency in the treatment of certain forms of disease, notably in various affections classed as rheumatic. ”

“ He shows, on the contrary, that the atmosphere of a room such as that spoken of in the passage just quoted must have the power of inducing fever in others besides the patient. He even says that "the poison formed by the exhalations given off from the living bodies of those affected by fever is by far the most potent febrile poison derived from animal origin."
Then, it might be asked, of what consequence is it to insist on the disease being non-contagious? If fever-patients can give fever to others, it is a mere matter of words whether you choose to call it "contagious" or "infectious." ”

“ In like manner small-pox is a fever attended with a peculiar eruption upon the skin, which eruption modifies the disease in a very remarkable manner, and gives it a history and progress peculiarly its own; but it is as much a genuine fever as typhus, and ought no more to be taken out of this class on account of the eruption upon the skin, than scarlatina, which likewise modifies, in a very considerable degree, the whole train of febrile symptoms, and is attended with a peculiar condition of some exceedingly important internal organs. ”

“ Whytt at Edinburgh, published in the Physical and Literary Essays, defines the disease, to be “that fever, which continues two or three days, and terminates without any critical discharge by sweat, urine, stool, &c. leaving the patient excessively weak, with a small pulse, easily depressible by very little motion, or by an erect posture; and which is soon succeeded by an icteritious (jaundice) 388 colour in the white of the eyes and the skin; vomiting, hæmorrhages, &c. and those without being accompanied with any degree of a febrile pulse and heat.” ”

“ There are few adult persons in this country who have not, by observation or experience, become somewhat familiar with this disease. Its manifestations are both constitutional and local, and their intensity varies exceedingly in different cases. The constitutional symptoms are usually the first to appear, and are of a febrile character. A distinct chill, attended by nausea and general derangement of the stomach is experienced, followed by febrile symptoms more or less severe. There are wandering pains in the body and sometimes a passive delirium exists. ”

“ The periodical pains in the head, eyes, ears, jaws, hips, and back, which occur in the sickly autumnal months, and which impart no fulness, force, nor frequency to the pulse, are all misplaced fevers. There are, besides these, many other local morbid affections, which are less suspected of belonging to febrile diseases. The nature of these states of fever may easily be understood, by recollecting one of the laws of sensation, that is, that certain impressions, which excite neither sensation nor motion in the part of the body to which they are applied, excite both in another part. ”

“ Rare cases may run an acute course and show a high death rate. The fever course resembles that of a typhoid fever with two or more relapses, in that a step-like rise of fever for ten or twelve days is followed by a similar fall during the succeeding week or ten days, an afebrile interval of a few days then ensuing, to be followed by a second or third or even tenth febrile wave with the separating days of apyrexia. The course of the disease may last for a year or more attended with progressive anaemia and manifestations of neurasthenia. ”

“ We will lose nothing and gain enormously by adopting this routine plan in all cases of snuffling noses, sore throats, headache, and fever in children, for these are the early symptoms of all their febrile diseases, from colds to diphtheria; all alike are infectious and all, even to the mildest, benefited by a few days of rest and seclusion. ”

“ Claiborne, in an ingenious inaugural dissertation, published in Philadelphia, in the year 1798, to be a misplaced state of malignant fever. Dr. Lind mentions likewise the timber of new ships as one of the sources of febrile diseases. The timber of soldiers' huts, and of the cabins of men who follow the business of making charcoal in the woods, often produce fevers, as soon as the bark begins to rot and fall from them, which is generally on the second year after they are erected. Fevers have been excited even by the exhalation from trees, that have been killed by being girdled in an old field. ”

“ DEFINITION.—A continued fever, occurring in widely-extended epidemics, and due to a specific cause; it is characterized by early catarrh of the mucous membrane of the respiratory tract, and in many cases also of the digestive tract; by quickly oncoming debility out of proportion to the intensity of the fever and the catarrhal processes; and by nervous symptoms. There is a strong tendency to inflammatory complications, especially of the lungs. Uncomplicated cases are rarely fatal except in feeble and aged persons. An attack does not confer immunity from the disease in future epidemics. ”

“ It prevails chiefly in cool and cold weather, but is never epidemic; for the excreted matters which produce the fever do not float in the external atmosphere, nor are they communicated, so as to produce disease, more than a few feet from the persons who exhale them. They are sometimes communicated by means of the clothes which have been worn by the sick, and there have been instances in which the fever has been produced by persons who had not been confined by it, but who had previously been exposed to all the causes which generate it. ”

“ The contagion, -like that of typhus, appears to be most active in the immediate vicinity of the patient and to be greatly lessened by the access of fresh air. It is capable of being conveyed by clothing. The incubation of the disease is about one week. The symptoms of the fever then show themselves with great abruptness and violence by a rigor, accompanied with pains in the limbs and severe headache. ”

“ When the fever attacks suddenly, it always begins with an uneasy sensation of excessive cold, accompanied with debility and loss of appetite; frequently the cold is attended with shivering, oppression about the heart, and sickness at stomach, or vomiting.
Fevers are divided into continual, remitting, intermitting, and such as are attended with cutaneous eruption or topical inflammation, as the small-pox, erysipelas, &c. By a continual fever is meant 142that which never leaves the patient during the whole course of the disease, or which shews no remarkable increase or abatement in the symptoms. ”

“ In the worst forms of fever the blood gets so impure that it steams out, through the breath, vapors [450] which are able to produce the same kind of disease in other people, and which are, under these circumstances, termed infection. The infectious poison-vapors of fever get so strong when they are received into close rooms, and are not allowed to be blown away, that they often kill persons who breathe them in that state, very quickly. ”

“ They are at all times too serious to be left, with safety, in the hands of the domestic practitioner. Medical aid, therefore, should be instantly sought for, as much depends on proper management during the first stage of the fever. The approach of this disease may be known, by attending to the symptoms which precede the eruption, in the following order: First, the patient complains of shivering, with a sense of coldness, a thin watery discharge from the nose, hoarseness, cough, and a continued flow of tears from the eyes, which appear red and inflamed. ”

“ Almost the only cause for a fever is disease germs growing in the body. We can make a person have any kind of fever by planting a few of the germs of the fever in the right part of his body.
We are made sick by the germs of fevers more often than by all other causes put together. Here is a list of common diseases caused by fever germs:—colds and sore throats, most stomach aches, blood poisoning in wounds, boils and pimples, tuberculosis, whooping cough, measles, chicken pox, diphtheria, scarlet fever, typhoid fever, smallpox, and malaria. ”

“ I wish these symptoms to be remembered by the reader. They will form the corner stone of a system which I hope will either eradicate the disease altogether, or render it as safe as an intermitting fever, or as the small-pox when it is received by inoculation.
Frequent as these precursors of the fever were, they were not universal. Many went to bed in good health, and awoke in the night with a chilly fit. [95] Many rose in the morning after regular and natural sleep, and were seized at their work, or after a walk, with a sudden and unexpected attack of the fever. ”

“ One attack usually confers immunity.
Symptoms.—Incubation is about three to four days. There may be a fore-warning period, but the attack is usually sudden, with chills, headache, backache, rise in fever, and general feverish symptoms, vomiting, and constipation. Early in this disease the face is flushed, while the conjunctiva and the mucous membrane lining the eyelids is congested and slightly jaundiced. Fever is 102 or 103 degrees, and falls gradually after one to three days. Pulse is slow, and while the temperature rises, it again falls. ”

“ By committing the cure of this and other pestilential epidemics to the people, all those circumstances which prevented the universal success of purging and bleeding, in this disease, will have no operation. The fever will be mild in most cases, for all will prepare themselves to receive it, by a vegetable diet, and by moderate evacuations. The remedies will be used the moment the disease is felt, or even seen, and its violence and danger will thereby be obviated. ”

“ There is reason to believe, if the efforts of Nature, at the beginning of a fever, were duly attended to and promoted, it would seldom continue long; but when her attempts are either neglected or counteracted, it is no wonder if the disease proves fatal. There are daily instances of persons who, after catching cold, have all the symptoms of a beginning fever; but by keeping warm, drinking diluting liquors, bathing their feet in warm water, &c. the symptoms in a few hours disappear, and the danger is prevented. ”

“ These periods of metrical fever, so to speak, seem to come on without any apparent immediately exciting cause, and some people succumb to the disease, others do not, just the same as in the cases of cholera, influenza, plague, etc. ”

“ Miliary fever, febris purpurata, rubra and alba, is never epidemick, and is denied to be a primary disease; but is spurious, symptomatick, accessary, or fortuitous; it is very rare, and may be complicated with the nervous and putrid, and with small pox and measles. The miliaris alba is more frequent amongst the female sex, especially during the puerperal state, and in other females debilitated by fluor albus, and hemorrhages, of weak constitutions, delicate, prolifick. It sometimes exhibits previous symptoms of angina, pleurisy, catarrh, rheumatism, erysipelas. ”

“ Hence, after treating upon a symptomatic pleurisy which sometimes accompanied a slow fever, in the year 1675, and which had probably been injudiciously treated by some of those physicians who prescribe for the name of a disease, he delivers the following aphorism: “Whoever, in the cure of fevers, hath not always in view the constitution of the year, inasmuch as it tends to produce some particular epidemic disease, and likewise to reduce all the cotemporary diseases to its own form and likeness, proceeds in an uncertain and fallacious way [34] .” ”

“ And this is the true origin, in many cases, of typhus symptoms; of adynamic fever. The disease is allowed to take its own course; and the product of every fever, at a certain stage of its process, is adynamia: the physician does not perform his office; the disease advances; the restlessness increases; there is no sleep; delirium comes on; muscular tremor begins to be perceptible; the pulse rises; the sensibility diminishes ”

“ The common continued fever of this country, in its mildest form, requires little or no treatment. There is no affection of any organ intense enough to need the application of a powerful remedy. All the organs which constitute the febrile circle are deranged in their functions, but that derangement is so slight that a cure takes place spontaneously in the course of a few days. ”

“ Examples are found in the yellow fever, in catarrh or influenza, in nervous and putrid fever, and, among many other disorders, in miliary fever, a disease which first grew to a national pestilence in the 17th century, and which, in the kind and manner of its infecting power, approaches nearest to the sweating fever. ”

“ Whenever, in the onset of fever, a patient is found with intense head-ache or intense pain in the back and loins, and a slow pulse, the physician ought to be greatly alarmed at the severity of the symptoms that are to follow, and if he do not take the most active measures to break the violence of the disease at this early period, it will be beyond all control in a day or two, and the patient will be dead before the fever is well formed in milder cases. ”

“ It is the duty of the physician to fight the fever, since the patient may succumb to a high temperature, as to a low one.
In order to gauge the situation accurately it is necessary to regard fever, not as a disease, but as what it really is in essence: a symptom which accompanies the greatest variety of the processes of disease,—symptom of the most variable significance in various cases. It must be fought like other symptoms, such as vomiting, coughing, pains and diarrhoea; namely, in a general way—provided only that it is not a manifestation of the healing tendency of the organism. ”