Vol VI CLEVELAND JOURNAL JANUARY 1901 No 1 H The History of Typhoid fever BY HD HASKINS M D CLEVELAND AVING found the study of this topic so interesting I trust you will bear with me if I seem to discuss the subject more fully than its importance warrants. It is probable that typhus and typhoid fevers were practically unknown in Europe until the fifteenth century. Early in the sixteenth century Fracastori recognized and described typhus. He claimed that the disease was brought into Italy from Cyprus between 1505 and 1528. The earliest positive evidence that we have of the existence of true typhoid fever is the description by Spigelius in the seventeenth century of cases of continued fever which showed intestinal lesions. Baglivi in 1696, and Lancisi in 1718, described cases occurring in Rome in which the bowels were found to be ulcerated. Extremely interesting is Morgagni's description of a case (1761). The case began with dysentery and colic, accompanied with simple fever. In a fortnight the dysentery changed to yellow diarrhea without colic, the fever continuing. In another two weeks the fever was superseded by "paroxysms of acute fever." The patient died on the fourteenth day of the acute attack. Postmortem the abdomen was found to contain sanious pus, which welled up through many perforations of the intestines. The area of perforation comprised the end of the ileum and two spans length of the ascending colon. The inner surface of these sections of the bowel was eroded, ulcerated, and almost gangrenous. Several mesenteric glands were soft and enlarged. The spleen was thrice its normal size. Typhoid fever, then, is known to have occurred in its characteristic form for two hundred years. The history of the discrimination of typhoid as a disease separate from Read before the Cleveland Medical Society November 9, 1900, in the Symposium on Typhoid Fever 220857 |