ERYSIPELAS.
BY JAMES NEVINS HYDE, M.D.
DEFINITION.—Erysipelas is an acute disorder, characterized by the systemic symptoms common to the febrile state, and by an involvement of the integument and deeper parts, the affected surface being tumid, hot, reddened, painful, and often the seat of well-defined bullæ, the process terminating either in complete resolution after cutaneous desquamation or in a fatal result commonly due to complications of the malady.
SYNONYMS.—Eng. St. Anthony's Fire; Fr. Érysipèle; Germ. Rothlauf; Ital. Risipolo.
CLASSIFICATION.—Erysipelas is properly recognized as one of the acute infectious diseases. Though by its symptoms and career it would seem to be properly assigned to the category of the exanthemata, it is yet by most authors set apart from the latter—first, because its career is less specifically defined; second, because its contagiousness is less demonstrable in every case; third, because one attack is not known to confer upon its victims immunity against a second; fourth, because the occasional prevalence of the disease in apparently epidemic form is evidently due to extrinsic causes, and does not depend exclusively upon its sudden appearance among the unprotected; fifth, because no definite period of incubation precedes its earliest manifestations; and, sixth, because at times it appears in local manifestations apparently unaccompanied by systemic phenomena.
HISTORY.—The earliest writers on medicine bear witness to the fact that the disease was recognized at the date when men first made record of human ailments. It has occurred in all parts of the world and at all seasons of the year, sparing neither age nor sex in its development. Zuelzer1 refers to epidemic occurrences of the disorder, described by Rayer, as visiting the Paris hospitals in 1828; by Schönlein, as existing in Zürich in 1836; by Gintrac, as spreading in Bordeaux in 1844-45; and by Trousseau, as prevailing in the Maternité in Paris in 1858.
1 Cyclop, of the Prac. of Med., Ziemssen, vol. iv. p. 424.