Clinical medicine : observations recorded at the bedside with commentaries / by W.T. Gairdner.

  • William Tennant Gairdner
Date:
1862
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Clinical medicine : observations recorded at the bedside with commentaries / by W.T. Gairdner. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    times before, on account of disease of the heart. She has, I think, a contracted mitral orifice; and with this there is associated, at present, a great deal of lividity, with feverishness, and marked prostration of strength ; the consequences, no doubt, of influenza acting upon organs predisposed to disease. I should think badly of this case if I had not seen it before ; but this girl has repeatedly got over attacks considerably worse than the present in a very short time. She has all that elas- ticity of constitution which appears to be the exclusive endowment of youth ; and she is in every respect a very good and hopeful little patient. [She recovered in a few days.] Summary of Observations.—Let me now review these facts. Here, within the space of less than a fortnight, you have seen admitted into our wards (with an aver- age population under 40) no fewer than 11 cases of febrile disease, associated with pulmonary symptoms of one kind or other. Most of these, no doubt, were com- plicated cases, and only one of them could be called simple influenza. But this is because simple influenza is usually too rapid and too mild a disease to be ad- mitted to an hospital. We see here, not the disease, but the consequences and complications of the disease. In private and in dispensary practice we see the disease itself. Of these 11 cases of chest affection, 1 was double pleuro-pneumonia ; 1 was pleurisy and pericarditis ;