Elements of Practical Medicine (Volume 2) (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1841. Excerpt: ... some degree, prove the earlier the stage of the disease, the more infectious is the matter, and the severer the symptoms. He inoculated, for example, three persons with syphilitic poison. In the first of these cases, matter was taken from an ulcer of ten days standing, and the inoculated disease terminated in fourteen days; in the second, from an ulcer only eight days old. when the inoculated disease continued eighteen days, hut in the third case, the matter was taken later or just before the cessation of the ulcerative stage, and the inoculated disease, continued twenty-eight days. Ricord has repeated these experiments, and affirms, as a further result, that syphilitic pus taken from a primary sore is not contagious in its latter stages, hut only when the ulcer is extending or stationary, for during the process of reparation or of cicatrisation, he found inoculation produced none of its usual effects, so that he imagines, there is a period when the sore passes into the state of a simple ulcer. Beaumes has been led by his experiments to another singular result, or that pus, taken from one part of a healing ulcer is often innocuous, while that from another part will frequently communicate the disease, a result which, if established by further experiment, is an exception to the laws of poisons generally; for the poison of the vaccine pox, of the small-pox, and of the varicella, exists in the crust, the last cicatrising stage of those affections. But this doctrine is too dangerous to be relied on, and, practically speaking, no person can be considered in health till the sore has entirely healed. The primary sore is very frequently followed by bubo, and it has long been a question, whether pus from a bubo will or will not communicate this disease. The experim...