[TO BE CONTINUED.]

FEVER.

At present all branches of Science possess an intrinsic interest for every intelligent man, but such elementary knowledge as enables its possessor to understand the explanations of the medical attendant has a double value.  Over and over again I have heard the remark when some bold successful treatment was being discussed, “But you would not have dared to do that in private practice.”  The days of medical mystification are not yet entirely passed, but year by year the profession is assuredly losing that peculiar virtue of office which it formerly possessed in so eminent a degree.  The doctor is no longer a dignified personage with gold-headed cane and powdered wig, mounting the mansion steps with stately tread, but a busy man in various garb, hurrying from house to house, studying the multitudinous problems of disease, and applying the fruits of such study to the relief of individual cases.  No longer able to awe his patients into obedience, he must rely upon his moral and intellectual powers in controlling them.  To enable any one to understand the explanations of physicians, and to protect himself, by discovery, against the impudent assumptions of quacks, some knowledge of medical truths and of the drift of modern medical thought is necessary.  Every successful physician, no matter how independent he may be by nature, is necessarily more or less cramped by the prejudices of patients—­prejudices which often a little primary instruction would have done away with.

Of all the diseased processes fever is one of the most frequent and one of the most serious in their results.  A discussion, therefore, of its nature, the method of its production and of its relief, will, it may be hoped, engage the attention of the general reader.

If the hand be laid upon the skin of a person in a high fever the attention is at once attracted by the great heat, and if the bulb of a thermometer be placed under the tongue or in the armpit of the patient the mercury may indicate a temperature of 107 deg., 108 deg., 109 deg., or even 110 deg.  Fahrenheit, instead of 98 deg. to 99 deg.  Fahrenheit, the normal temperature of the human body.  It is a common belief that the skin in fever is always dry as well as hot, but this is a mistake, as intense fever may coexist with a reeking perspiration.  During the fever the pulse is greatly increased in frequency, the head aches and throbs, and if the attack be very severe restlessness, sudden startings, irregular muscular twitchings, or even violent epileptiform convulsions and stupor, delirium or coma, indicate the disturbance of the nervous system.

These various symptoms are simply results of the excess of caloric, which excites universal irritation, and, if prolonged, destroys the tissues.  This fact I have verified by three series of experiments, by the first of which it was shown that the general application of external heat so as to raise the bodily temperature produces all the phenomena of fever; by the second, that the local application of heat to the brain and to the heart causes the nervous and circulatory disturbances so universally seen in fever; and by the third that the abstraction of heat in fever is followed by immediate subsidence of the other symptoms.