Academical Lectures On Fevers Read In The Royal College At Paris

Author : Donald Macalister
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780282058487
Total Pages : 56 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (584 download)

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Download or read book The Nature of Fever written by Donald Macalister and published by . This book was released on 2017-05-27 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from The Nature of Fever: Being the Gulstonian Lectures Delivered at the Royal College of Physicians of London in March 1887In the first place it is necessary to state what I mean by fever. I need hardly say that I do not refer exclusively to the specific infective diseases grouped together as the erup tive or continued fevers. I speak of the condition of feverishness or pyrexia which is common to these diseases and to many others - the disordered inward condition of the body-heat, whose frequent and most manifest outward sign is high temperature. It is of course true that the term fever conveys to our mind a more complex notion - it implies, in general, disorder of the circulation and the respiration, of secretion and digestion, of the nervous system and the mus culat system, as well as of the body-heat. But without say ing, as some have said, that all the other disorders of function which we describe as febrile are merely consequences of the disorder of temperature, I shall not be going too far if I state at the outset that the essential fact in fever - the condition which is always present whether other of its symptoms are present or absent - is disorder of the body-heat. In using the word essential rather than primary, I wish to avoid the pre-judgment suggested by the latter. Other conditions may precede in time or in causation the essential symptom of disordered heat, and according to the confidence or the refinement of our analysis we may term one. Or another of them primary, but not until the essential symptom is present have we to do with fever. We have a like state of things inthe case of inflammation. The single word covers a whole series of processes; each process is a complex of many ele ments. It implies changes textural and changes vascular, changes nervous and changes mechanical. And in the gradual development of pathological knowledge now one and now another of these has been regarded as primary. But to-day we are justified in holding, for the reasons so admirably set forth by your Lumleian lecturer in 1882, that alteration or damage of the minuter blood vessels is the essential condition, without which there is no inflammation.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.