A treatise on the theory and practice of medicine / by John Syer Bristowe.

Date:
1882
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A treatise on the theory and practice of medicine / by John Syer Bristowe. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    no case the primary causes of the morbid processes from which patients suffer. Thus, the person who suffers from stricture of the oesophagus or bowel, and whose grave symptoms are all referrible to the stricture, owes his stricture to previous local inflammatory thickening, ulceration, or carcinoma ; and he, who dies from the consequences of mechanical im- pediment to the passage of blood through the mitral orifice, traces the affection of the mitral valve to a long antecedent attack of rheumatic fever. 2. Chemical causes of disease include all poisonous substances, whether they be derived from the inorganic or from the organic kingdom, and however variously they exert their influence over the system. The great majority of these are necessarily exopathic. Some, like the caustic alkalies and mineral acids, destroy the surfaces to which they are ap- plied ; others, like opium, strychnia, aconite, and snake-poisons, undergo absorption, and quickly exert their chief influence on particular organs, or on the general system; while others, again, introduced into the or- ganism habitually and in minute quantities, slowly induce characteristic organic and other changes, and what are commonly regarded as definite diseases. Thus, dropped hand and colic, or plumbism, are the results of chronic lead-poisoning; muscular tremors indicate mercurialism, or the ultimate effect of the inhalation of mercurial vapours ; the fumes of phosphorus after a time cause necrosis of the jaws; the habitual use of ergotised cereals for food is believed to bring about a peculiar form of gangrene of the lower extremities ; and not improbably en- demic goitre and cretinism are due to the constant slow action of some material agent. We must obviously also include here the poisonous effects of certain articles of food—mussels, fungi, sausages, and the like —and those which flow from the habitual use of alcohol, tobacco, and opium. Endopathic chemical causes are principally such as depend on defective action of the excretory organs, and the consequent retention in the system of effete matters which then act as poisons. The chief emunctories for the purification of the blood are the kidneys, liver, lungs, and skin. If the kidneys act inefficiently, urea and other excretory constituents of the urine accumulate in the blood, and by their presence there at length induce epileptiform convulsions, dropsy, ansemia, and other symptoms which collectively indicate the presence of Bright’s disease. If the liver fail to discharge its normal functions, jaundice follows, and with that, and in some degree in consequence of it, many other grave symptoms. When, from mechanical or other impediment to respiration, the blood becomes overcharged with carbonic acid, lividity of surface, delirium, and coma presently supervene. The cutaneous exhalation is for the most part merely complementary to that of the lungs and kidneys ; and hence the injurious effects of its arrest are not very apparent; at the same time, doubtless, serious consequences are often correctly attributed to its sup- pression. Here we may refer, also, to the ill effects of that accumulation in the blood of the various ill-defined products of decomposition, which