24. Great insensibility to common occurrences, and an indifference about the issue of the disease.
25. Uncommon serenity of mind, accompanied with an unusually placid countenance.
I shall conclude this head by the following remarks:
1. The violence, danger, and probable issue of this fever, seem to be in proportion to the duration and force of the predisposing and exciting causes. However steady the former are in bringing on debility, and the latter in acting as irritants upon accumulated excitability, yet a knowledge of their duration and force is always useful, not only in forming an opinion of the probable issue of the fever, but in regulating the force of remedies.
2. The signs of danger vary in different years, from the influence of the weather upon the disease.
3. Notwithstanding the signs of the favourable and unfavourable issue of the fever are in general uniform, when the cure of the disease is committed to nature, or to tonic medicines, yet they are far from being so when the treatment of the fever is taken out of the hands of nature, and attempted by the use of depleting remedies. We often see patients recover with nearly all the unfavourable symptoms that have been mentioned, and we sometimes see them die, with all those that are favourable. The words of Morellus, therefore, which he has applied to the plague, are equally true when applied to the yellow fever. “In the plague, our senses deceive us. Reason deceives us. The aphorisms of Hippocrates deceive us[7].” An important lesson may be learned from these facts, and that is, never to give a patient over. On the contrary, it is our duty in this, as well as in all other acute diseases, to dispute every inch of ground with death. By means of this practice, which is warranted by science, as well as dictated by humanity, the grave has often been deprived for a while of its prey, and a prelude thereby exhibited of that approaching and delightful time foretold by ancient prophets, when the power of medicine over diseases shall be such, as to render old age the only outlet of human life.
Footnotes:
[1] De Febre Indiæ-Occidentalis Maligna Flava, p. 12.
[2] Annals of Medicine, p. 123.
[3] Maladies de Gens de Mer, vol. i. p. 345.