A new mode of treating puerperal fever / by Charles Bell.

  • Bell, Charles.
Date:
[1872]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A new mode of treating puerperal fever / by Charles Bell. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    1/6
    A NEW MODE OF TREATING PUERPERAL FEVER. By Dr CHARLES BELL. {Read before the Obstetrical Society of Edinburgh, 27 th March, and reprinted from the Edinburgh Medical Journal for June 1872.) It is not my intention to enter on a lengthened dissertation on puerperal fever, as it is fully described in many of our works on midwifery, and my object is merely to bring more prominently under the notice of the Society a mode of treatment which I have been induced to recommend, from its successful results in diseases of a.similar nature, as well as in the few cases of this disease in which I have had the opportunity of employing it. .For, although I have been connected with the Royal Maternity Hospital for many years, only one case of puerperal fever has occurred during the period I was doing duty. I ascribe this immunity frOm the dis¬ ease, to the liberal use of the permanganate of potash, both as a lotion and in the form of liniment, in making examination per vaginam, and to a strict attention to ventilation, and to the avoid¬ ance of overcrowding the wards. I feel satisfied that there is greater risk to the parturient woman, from a close contaminated atmosphere, than from the free admission of pure air into the lying-in chamber. I have therefore always ordered one of the windows of the wards to be kept partially open. The more we study puerperal fever, the correctness of the opinion entertained by Sennertus and Riverius will appear the more obvious, namely, that it is a blood disease arising from the absorption of a virulent poison into the system, which is communicable from one individual to another, and may also be inhaled from the atmos¬ phere. This circumstance was fully illustrated by M. Peu, in his description of the epidemic fever which appeared in the Hotel Dieu in 1664, when a great number of women died, in consequence of