On the remedial agency of a local anaesthetic or benumbing temperature, in various painful and imflammatory [i.e. inflammatory] diseases / by James Arnott.

  • Arnott, James Moncrieff, 1794-1885.
Date:
1851
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the remedial agency of a local anaesthetic or benumbing temperature, in various painful and imflammatory [i.e. inflammatory] diseases / by James Arnott. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

    13/56 (page 11)
    Other writers have followed the opposite course. Cullen has not even given headach a place in his “Nosology/5 con- sidering it, in every instance, to be merely a symptom of other disease; and a deservedly popular systematic author of the present day. Dr. Watson, has admitted into his catalogue of diseases only one species of headach, namely, hemicrania or brow-ague, which he considers to be a species of neuralgia. The error of Cullen is great and manifest, and has been generally commented upon : and it will hardly be denied that if hemicrania be a distinct malady, and a species of neuralgia, other kinds of headach, equally well marked, ought to find a place in the list of diseases, whether they are regarded as neuralgic affections or not.* have met with, if he have not actually experienced in his own person, headachs which at one and the same time possessed all the characters Dr. Good has enumerated as marking five distinct species,” presents his readers with a long list of eleven varieties, certainly not more perfect than the various classifications which he condemns. Two if not three of these varieties are only so many kinds of symptomatic headachy, while all the others are excluded; one includes two different diseases; and the variety named cerebral headach, comprehends every disease of the brain and cranium. With reference to the descriptions of the varieties of this and other ill defined disorders to be met with in medical works, it must be confessed that they too often appear to consist of a few symptoms grouped into various fanciful or arbitrary arrangements, just as an unlimited set of new forms are made in the kaleidoscope by shaking together a few bits of coloured glass. This kaleidoscope symptomatology, no doubt, impresses a certain class of readers with profound reverence for the writers power of discrimina- tion ; but it confounds and disgusts the student of more intelligence. * The employment by writers, of the same term, headach, to denote both a particular disease, and the pain that is only a symptom of diseases bearing other names, has led to confusion on this point. Many other terms, such as fever, dropsy, jaundice, and haemoptysis, are like- wise often employed in both of these senses, and often with similar consequences. When pathology shall have so far advanced as to enable us to name every disease according to its nature or proximate cause, the confusion from this source will cease, and not till then. In the mean time there is no security against error in diagnosis, but in correct artificial classification; and whoever would aid the junior practitioner’s remembrance of resembling or associated diseases, by adapting such a classification to some of the expedients devised by writers on “ memoria technica,” would well deserve his gratitude.