brain fever
...Mary had the measles in Burr Oak and the illness, they called it brain fever, that caused her blindness was the effect of the measels [sic]. She had the brain fever in Walnut Grove. - Laura Ingalls Wilder to Rose Wilder Lane, December 1937.

This disease is one of the most alarming and fatal affections that physicians have to deal with. It usually comes on with headache, intense and deep-seated, which somtimes seems to occupy the whole head: sometimes some particular part of it, as the forehead, side, or base, and occasionally shoots from one point to another. It is usually constant, but many times paroxysymal, coming and going, and being more severe at one moment than another. There is usually a chill, more or less marked. The back aches, the feet are cold, the bowels constipated, but not always; the skin is hot, and not much sidposed to moisture; the pulse is rapid and hard, and sometimes irregular; and the pupils of the eyes contracted, no infrequently to the size of a pin's head. There is an intolerance of light and noise, loss of appetite and vomiting; the eyes are suffused, and have an excited look, and often there is squinting; the face is either flushed or pale; the temporal arteries throb; there is wakefulness, restlessness, uneven respiration and sighing; a tottering gait, if the patient attemts to walk; ringing in the ears, and sometimes convulsions. After a certain length of time, delirium sets in, usually coming on at night, or it may be present, to a greater or less extent, from the beginning. There is incoherency, uneasiness, and slight shudderings. The patient wants to get up, and must be held in bed, or he will do so. He now tugs patiently away, endeavoring to arise, never getting weary or angry, for hours at a time, and finally, if he should be allowed to do so, he gets up on the floor, totters feebly around, gazes indifferently about him, and seems to have no object in the world for wanting to get out of bed. Light is not painful to him now, and his headache is usually gone; the pupils no longer remain contracted, but become much larger in size than is natural; the sight and hearing become impaired; liquids like in the mouth without being swallowed, or are allowed to run out of it; the delirium yields gradually into drowsiness, attended often with twitching of the tendons and picking at the bed-clothes; and the pulse, instead of being frequent, as at first, is slow and measured, and the repiration uneven, and interrupted with deep sighs. Convulsions are not infrequent, and the urine sometimes dribbles away without the consciousness of the patient. As the disease progresses in its course, the drowsiness grows deeper and deeper, until a complete state of insensibility ensues. The patient lies upon his back, lifeless and immovable. The pulse becomes very fast and weak; the repiration grows more irregular and sobbing; the skin becomes cold, and covered with a clammy perspiration; the features grow sunken and haggard, the spinchter muscles of the body relax, and the patient dies in a state of profound insensibility.

This is the usual more of attack and course of the disease, but it does not always follow these rules. Sometimes it is ushered in with convulsions, which leaves the patient in a stupor, from which he only arouses when pinched or sharply spoken to, and immediately falls back again. In other cases, this drowsiness or stupor is the prominent symptoms from the comencement; and still at other times delirium is the first symptom, which gradually increases as the disease advances, or is furious from the onset. In some rare instances the disease has been known to commence with a sudden loss of speech, but his form is not at all common.

The course of the disease is very uncertain. When it comes on with violoent delirium or stupor, it may terminate fatally within the first twenty-four hours. It more usually lasts, however, from one to three weeks, if treatment is not successful in relieving it.

The causes are blows of falls upon the head; exposure of the head, unprotected, to the rays of the sun, or to artificial heat; violent mental excitement, hard study, etc. It always is more common in men than in women, but women are not by any means exempt from it. It occasionally supervenes upon scarlet fever or small pox, and sometimes from disease or trouble of any kind in the ear.

The treatment is what physicians term "strictly antiphogistic" -- that is, opposing inflammation, for the disease in itself is an inflammation of the membranes which cover the brain, and protect if from the skull. No individual, without the experience or practice of a physician, should undertake to treat the case without the aid of one. It is a dangeroud disease, and what is to be done for the good of the patient, must be done in the beginning, before the inflammation gets too much under headway. When the symptoms begin to make their appearance, give an active cathartic, make cold applications to the head, soak the feet in warm water, and apply mustard poultices, and send for a physician. This is the best thing that can be done, and the quicker it is done, the better.

So says Dr. Charles P. Uhle, January 1872.
- posted by pioneergirl at 2:30 AM