Summary Of Rush By Devize

Like Rush, Devéze wrote an account about the fever and its victims throughout the duration of the epidemic. In, An enquiry into, and observations upon the causes and effects of the epidemic disease, Devéze wrote his theory for the cause of the fever and all of the treatments he conducted at Bush Hill. There is an element in his notes that is not seen in Rush’s. Devéze wrote specific details about his patients. The medical notes of Rush do not include the details like Devéze provides. In a passage of his writings, Rush writes that he gave patients fifteen grains of jalap and ten grains of calomel. He then goes on to write that he had saved four out of five patients with this regiment. In Devéze’s notes there is a descriptions about the …show more content…
From Rush’s notes, it can be inferred that he generalized his patients and gave the same remedies to all. Devéze’s notes indicate that he did not generalize his patients but rather examined each as individual cases. The difference between the notes represents the conduct of American medicine. American medicine did not use individualism. Remedies were implemented on all patients without the acknowledgment of differences of the body. The Americans who generalized their patients continued to use the European method of medicine. In Europe, depletion was the only accepted theory for treating the body of all diseases. This theory was taught to the Americans like Rush who had traveled to Edinburgh. It was also taught to those who had attended the Medical Department of the College; which was modeled after the school of Edinburgh. It did not matter what the illness, condition of the body, age or gender was, the patient’s humors had to be brought back to balance with a form of depletion. The act of generalizing patients was another example of how America continued to be European in their practices. There was another aspect in Devéze’s notes that reveals the difference between the doctors of the West Indies and the doctors of America. Devéze conducted clinical practice instead of theory based approaches to the treatment of yellow fever. The use of clinical practice allowed Devéze to adjust his treatments throughout …show more content…
The treatments he began to use did not prevent his patients from succumbing to the fever. His third and fourth observations are examples of the issues that he was undergoing in his first attempts to treat the patients of Bush Hill. In his third observation, Devéze wrote about a thirty-three year old man who came to Bush Hill with burning skin, red eyes, breathing difficulties, tight pains in the head and was vomiting yellow vile. To treat the patient, he bled the patient four times, bathed him, and gave him lemonade. The patient died the fourth day of his time at Bush Hill. After his death, Devéze opened the body to find that the stomach was filled with air and contained black blood clots. In addition, the intestines were inflamed and also contained black blood clots . In the fourth observation, Devéze wrote that he was treating a twenty-six year old man who had burning skin, a strong pulse, and pains in the abdomen. To treat the man, he used a combination of lemonade, simple syrup. He also bled the man three times in one day. After administering this treatment, the man vomited blood after each drink and his body continued to burn with the fever. Devéze concluded that the man died on the eighteen of September. After the man’s death, Devéze performed an autopsy on the body. He had found that the stomach and intestines were inflamed and filled with blood. He also