Gout and goutiness and their treatment.

  • Ewart, William, 1848-1929.
Date:
1896
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Gout and goutiness and their treatment. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by University of Bristol Library. The original may be consulted at University of Bristol Library.

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    be overlooked. In certain families some members inherit gout badly, others slightly, others not at all; the slighter degrees of inheritance are perhaps observed with in- creasing frequency, and goutiness is becoming relatively more common than declared gout. In this circumstance, and in the general mitigation of all the arthritic manifestations, we see a hopeful sign. The possibility of an ultimate extinction of the bias in gouty families is denied by some authorities, but we should not forget that by the side of the tendency to a reproduction of morbid parental peculiarities there is a yet stronger tendency in Nature to reproduce the healthy type of the race in each successive generation. Meantime, one of the features of contemporary practice is the prominence allotted to the gouty factor, and the frequency with which it is held to complicate or modify other affections. The tendency to attribute to gout a variety of ailments of an obscure complexion, arising in those likely by in- heritance or by habit of life to be eventual victims, is by no means novel. Even forty years ago many diseases whose clinical features are now quite familiar were in those days unknown. Strange symptoms had to be explained under some of the available heads of disease, and gout came in for a large share of vicarious responsibility.* Errors in * Even so recently as 1854 Sir Spencer Wells wrote as follows in his ' Practical Observations on Gout and its Complications, and on the Treatment of Joints stiffened by Gouty Deposits' (John Churchill, 1854) : ' Any attempt to describe the nervous diseases of females caused by gout would lead to an enumeration of almost all forms of then- diseases, especially those usually considered as hysteric. The intestinal derangements, with tympanitis, neuralgia, or colic, the hysteric pain in the right epigastrium, the cardialgia and gastrodynia, the hysteric vomiting and epigastric spasms, the morbid sensibility of the pharynx and fauces, hysteric palpitation, asthma, or bronchitis,