The sensitive fevers with weak pulse, which are termed putrid or malignant fevers, are distinguished from irritative fevers with weak pulse, called nervous fevers, described in the last section, as the former consist of inflammation joined with debility, and the latter of debility alone.  Hence there is greater heat and more florid colour of the skin in the former, with petechiae, or purple spots, and aphthae, or sloughs in the throat, and generally with previous contagion.

When animal matter dies, as a slough in the throat, or the mortified part of a carbuncle, if it be kept moist and warm, as during its abhesion to a living body, it will soon putrify.  This, and the origin of contagion from putrid animal substances, seem to have given rise to the septic and antiseptic theory of these fevers.

The matter in pustules and ulcers is thus liable to become putrid, and to produce microscopic animalcula; the urine, if too long retained, may also gain a putrescent smell, as well as the alvine feces; but some writers have gone so far as to believe, that the blood itself in these fevers has smelt putrid, when drawn from the arm of the patient:  but this seems not well founded; since a single particle of putrid matter taken into the blood can produce fever, how can we conceive that the whole mass could continue a minute in a putrid state without destroying life?  Add to this, that putrid animal substances give up air, as in gangrenes; and that hence if the blood was putrid, air should be given out, which in the blood-vessels is known to occasion immediate death.

In these sensitive fevers with strong pulse (or inflammations) there are two sensorial faculties concerned in producing the disease, viz. irritation and sensation; and hence, as their combined action is more violent, the general quantity of sensorial power becomes further exhausted during the exacerbation, and the system more rapidly weakened than in irritative fever with strong pulse; where the spirit of animation is weakened by but one mode of its exertion:  so that this febris sensitiva pulsu forti (or inflammatory fever,) may be considered as the febris irritativa pulsu forti, with the addition of inflammation; and the febris sensitiva pulsu debili (or malignant fever) may be considered as the febris irritativa pulsu debili (or nervous fever), with the addition of inflammation.

4.  In these putrid or malignant fevers a deficiency of irritability accompanies the increase of sensibility; and by this waste of sensorial power by the excess of sensation, which was already too small, arises the delirium and stupor which so perpetually attend these inflammatory fevers with arterial debility.  In these cases the voluntary power first ceases to act from deficiency of sensorial spirit; and the stimuli from external bodies have no effect on the exhausted sensorial power, and a delirium like a dream is the consequence.  At length the internal stimuli cease