CAUSE'S OF FEVERS, &c.
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turns usually attendant on fevers, are nausea, thirst, anxiety, de-lirium, weariness, wasting of the flesh, want of sleep, or the sleepdisturbed .and not refreshing.
W hen the fever comes on gradually, the patient generally com-plains first of languor or listlessness, soreness of the flesh or thebones, as the country people express it, heaviness of the head,loss of appetite, sickness, with clamminess of the mouth ; after sometime come on excessive heat, violent thirst, restlessness, &c.
"When the fever attacks suddenly, it always begins with an un-easy sensation of excessive cold, accompanied with debility andloss of appetite ; frequently the cold is attended with shivering,oppression about the heart, and sickness at stomach, or vomiting.
Fever considered as an effort of nature, &c. — As a fever isonly an effort of Nature to free herself from an offending cause,*it is the business of those who have the care of the sick to observewith diligence which way Nature points, and to endeavour to as-sist her operations. Our bodies are so framed, as to have a con-stant tendency to expel or throw oft' whatever is injurious to health.This is generally done by urine, sweat, stool, expectoration, vomit,or some other evacuation.
There is reason to believe, if the efforts of Nature, at the begin-ning of a fever, were duly attended to and promoted, it would sel-dom continue long ; but when her attempts are either neglected orcounteracted, it is no wonder if the disease prove fatal. There aredaily instances of persons, who, after catching cold, have all thesymptoms of a beginning fever; but by keeping warm, drinkingdiluting liquors, bathing their feet in warm water, &c. the symp-toms in a few hours disappear, and the danger is prevented. Whenfeverg of a putrid kind threaten, the best method of obviating theireffects is by repeated vomits.
Our design is not to enter into a critical inquiry into the natureand immediate cause» of fevers, but to mark their most obvioussymptoms, and to point out the proper treatment of the patientwith respect to his diet, drink, air, &c. in the different stages ofthe diseases. In these articles the inclinations of the patient will ina great measure direct our conduct.
Almost every person in a fever complains of great thirst, andcalls out for drink, especially of a cooling nature. This at once
* It was the opinion of Hippocrates, that fever is an effort of nature to expel some-thing noxious to the body either ingenerated, or introduced from without. Beholdinga violent commotion in the system, followed by an evacuation from the skin and kid-neys, with which the paroxysm terminated, he ascribed the commotion to a fermenta-tion, concoction, or ebullition, by which the noxious matter was separated from thesound humours ; and the evacuation to a despumation or scum, which such separationproduces, or rather to the discharge of this morbid scum from the emunctories thatopen externally. Galen supported this hypothesis with all the learning of his day, andit is the only explanation of fever to be met with in his medical writings, through thelong course of three thousand years ; in fact till the time of Sydenham, who still adher-ed to it, and whose pages are full of the language to which it gave birth ; and it wasblended almost insensibly with the dialect of the chymists of the day. In itself, thisdoctrine, considered merely hypothetically, is not only innocent, but highly ingeniousand plausible. It is in unison with several phenomena of pyretic or febrile diseases ;and derives a strong collateral support from the general history of eruptive fever, inwhich we actually see a peccant matter, producing general commotion, multiplyingitself in a ferment, and at length separated and thrown off at the surface by a direstdepuration o£ the system. Ed.
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