All these
details have to be known before studying typhus in the grand army.
* * * * *
The description of diseases given by the physicians who lived a century ago
is for us unsatisfactory; we cannot understand what they meant by their
vague designating of hepatitis, fibrous enteritis, diarrhoea and dysentery,
peripneumonia, remittent and intermittent gastric fever, protracted nervous
fever, typhus and synochus; there is no distinction made in any of the
writings of that period between abdominal and exanthematic typhus.
However, before long physicians will discard much from our present medical
onomatology that is ridiculous, absurd, incorrect, in short, unscientific,
as, for instance, the designation typhoid fever.
Ebstein has pointed out all that is obscure to us in the reports of the
physicians of the Russian campaign; for instance, that we cannot
distinguish what is meant by the different forms of fever. According to the
views of those times fever was itself a disease _per se_; when reaction was
predominating it was called synocha, typhus when weakness was the feature,
and in case of a combination of synocha and typhus it was called synochus,
a form in which there was at first an inflammatory and later on a typhoid
stage, but which form could not be distinguished exactly from typhus. From
all the descriptions in the reports of the Russian campaign it can be
deduced that many of the cases enumerated were of exanthematic typhus,
notwithstanding that the symptomatology given is very incomplete, not to
speak of the pathological anatomy.
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