Diphtheria: its natural history and prevention.

  • Thorne, R. Thorne (Richard Thorne), Sir, 1841-1899.
Date:
1891
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Diphtheria: its natural history and prevention. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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    % Seventy years have elapsed since Bretonneau in 1821 submitted to the Academie Royale de Medecine in Paris his first ^Memoirs on Croup and Mahgnant Angina. In these Memoirs he maintained that a number of differently named diseases, associated with a membranous inflammation of the fauces and upper part of the air- passages, constituted, in fact, but one specific phleg- masia, for which he proposed the name diptherite {8t(f)9epa, pellis, pellicle, membrane). But whilst he held this view, he took occasion to urge that there were other affections of the throat which it was important to dis- tinguish from the specific Pellicular or Diphtheritic Angina he had described; and to prevent confusion between a group of diseases merely because they had certain features in common, he urged that microscopic research should be resorted to in order to a correct diagnosis; adding, for his part, how deeply he was im- bued with the dictum of Laennec: that diseases cannot be more certainly distinguished than by their anatomical characters. More than twenty years after, he admitted that the distinction he had sought to secure B