[53] Moore’s Medical Sketches.
[54] Moore’s Medical Sketches.
[55] Medical Inquiries and Observations, vol. iv, p. 133.
[56] Vol. iv, p. 133.
[57] Ibid. p. 149.
[58] A Pathognomic symptom is one which being present certainly indicates the presence of a disease, and being absent, the contrary.
[59] Vol. iv, p. 123.
[60] The vampire is a kind of bat, of a very large size, met with in some parts of South America and in the East Indies. This vile creature delights in human blood, and often attacks people in the night time in the most insidious manner. A late traveller relates that at Surinam he was bit by one of them, which sucked so much of his blood that in the morning he found himself exceedingly weak and faint. He felt no pain, nor was sensible of the injury in any other way. The vampire commonly attacks the great toe, making a wound so exceedingly small that the person is not awaked by it; it then sucks till gorged with blood, and, lest the patient should awake, it keeps fanning him all the while with its large wings, the coolness of which, in that hot climate, promotes sleep. In this manner some are said to have been destroyed. Captain Cook relates an humourous anecdote of one of his sailors, who being ashore at New Holland, and having wandered a little way into the woods, returned in a fright, crying out that he had seen the devil! Being asked in what shape Satan had appeared, he answered, “He was about the size of a one gallon keg, and very like it; and if I had not been afear’d, I might have touched him.” It was a vampire. The man, notwithstanding his fright, had not exaggerated its magnitude. People, though mistaken and terrified, are not to be disbelieved in every part of their relation.
[61] Non esse certi morbi genus, id quod pestilens vocatur, rectissime notatum a Galeno est (3 Epid. comm. 3. t. 20.) quicunque enim morbi ac symptomata consociantur pesti veræ proprieque diclæ, ijdem morbi pestilentes apellari consuevere, quorum equidem innumerabilis existit cohors, ac non semper et ubivis eadem. (Deusing. de Peste, Sect. iii.)