Diphtheritis or the membranous disease, commonly called membranous croup, as it appears in Roxbury and the vicinity of Boston / by B. E. Cotting ; reprinted from the Proceedings of the Boston Society for Medical Improvement.

  • Cotting, Benjamin Eddy, 1812-1897.
Date:
1859
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Diphtheritis or the membranous disease, commonly called membranous croup, as it appears in Roxbury and the vicinity of Boston / by B. E. Cotting ; reprinted from the Proceedings of the Boston Society for Medical Improvement. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    THE MEMBRANOUS DISEASE. ■ AifoTnwi thing which prevents some practitioners from knowing the futility of their own prescriptions, lad what Nature left to herself ran <h>, ll that Utff ri'V.r leave Nature to h. r-. If. The moment they are Called, they (ail to work with tin-ir draughty Julep*) and aposem re with imr. i«hm assiduity till the disease terminate! one way or the other \ if the patient recovers, the medicine gets the credit ; if ho dies, the disease is thought to have been Incurable.—Med. Sketches, by Jons Mookk, M.D. Lon Am km itu A.vous disease of the mucous tissues, peculiarly fatal when affecting the air-passages, has been known from time immemorial. Evidences of this knowledge may be fonnd under a vast variety of names in the works of older authors, and we have the best authority for the assertion that it may reasonably be doubted whether the ancients were not fully as well acquainted with dis- eases of the fauces and windpipe as the moderns are. This Vagueness in names, which have fluctuated perpetually in mean- ings ascribed to them, pervades also more recent descriptions, to such a degree that the number of new appellations has become even greater than that of the old. From the Prognostics of Hip- pocrates down to the late harangue of Trousseau, these names have represented symptoms, lesions, and localities, commingled in almost inextricable confusion. Singularly enough, the term most prevalent with the ancients, and that almost universally adopted within the last century, so far as they have any significance in themselves, indicate inconstant or unimportant symptoms merely, common to other complaints, or seldom occurring in true uncompli- cated membranous disease. The former has been obsolete for a