Читать книгу The Black Death in the Fourteenth Century онлайн

15 страница из 28

The affection of the stomach, often mentioned in vague terms, and occasionally as a vomiting of blood, was doubtless only a subordinate symptom, even if it be admitted that actual hematemesis did occur. For the difficulty of distinguishing a flow of blood from the stomach, from a pulmonic expectoration of that fluid, is, to non-medical men, even in common cases, not inconsiderable. How much greater then must it have been in so terrible a disease, where assistants could not venture to approach the sick without exposing themselves to certain death? Only two medical descriptions of the malady have reached us, the one by the brave Guy de Chauliac, the other by Raymond Chalin de Vinario, a very experienced scholar, who was well versed in the learning of his time. The former takes notice only of fatal coughing of blood; the latter, besides this, notices epistaxis, hematuria and fluxes of blood from the bowels, as symptoms of such decided and speedy mortality, that those patients in whom they were observed, usually died on the same or the following day.28

Правообладателям