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.

    125/772 (page 101)
    sensations. These were with him the only manifes- tations of influenza. [He afterwards, at an interval of ten days, had a slight cold in the head, without fever ; in the meantime, his whole family sickened with fever- ish colds, some of them with chest affection, from which he himself remained exempt throughout.] In another case, a gentleman (Mr. B.), who also suffers from habitual asthma and bronchitis, and in whom I suspect a morbidly enfeebled heart, sent for me in a great hurry on account of the alarming prostration produced by this strange and inexplicable “ influence.” He was, however, more frightened than hurt; in a couple of days he was convalescent, and the amount of bronchitis in his case never gave me the slightest uneasiness. Even the complications in influenza are not always of a catarrhal kind, nor yet confined to the chest. Ten years ago, in connection with a great and general epidemic of influenza, I witnessed in this hospital a succession of cases such as I have never seen since that time. In the course of a few weeks there occurred, I forget exactly how many, but upwards of half-a-dozen cases of severe inflammation of all the great serous membranes con- jointly—double pleurisy, pericarditis, peritonitis. Most of them were fatal; indeed, they seemed to come into the house only to die ; so rapid, so uncontrollable were the symptoms, that no time was given for the appli- cation of remedies, even had remedies been clearly indicated. It is somewhat remarkable, that the great epidemic