The practical medicine of to-day : two addresses delivered before the British Medical Association, and the Epidemiological Society / by Sir William Jenner.

  • Jenner, William, Sir, 1815-1898.
Date:
1869
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The practical medicine of to-day : two addresses delivered before the British Medical Association, and the Epidemiological Society / by Sir William Jenner. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    First among preventable diseases I will place one the mortality from which, in London at least, is so great as, beyond question, to swell largely the death-rate of child- ren under two years of age, and yet one that has no place in the Registrar-Genera? s returns. I mean rickets, the English disease, as it was formerly called. Not one child ought to die from rickets itself, and death from its conse- quences ought to be extremely rare; and yet the mortality from rickets, from diseases which would not occur but for the pre-existing rickets, and from diseases which would be trifling but for the co-existing rickets, is enormous. Laryngismus stridulus, chronic hydrocephalus, teething, convulsions, atrophy, disease of spleen and of liver, remit- tent fever, tabes mesenterica, spinal disease, bronchitis, diarrhoea, measles, whooping-cough,—these are some of the names under which deaths really due to rickets appear in the Registrar-GeneraFs returns. Syphilis, like rickets, is a preventable disease—the mor- tality from which is far greater than it appears to be in the Registrar-GeneraFs returns. It is only in recent times that physicians have begun to appreciate the gravity of the chronic constitutional consequences of this affection on the individual and on his offspring. The frequency with which cases of hepatic disease, of so-called tubercular phthisis, of Bright*s disease, of brain disease, are referable directly to syphilis, and the many cases of so-called stru- mous disease in the child due to inherited syphilis, becomes daily more apparent. Strumosis and tuberculosis are induced in a large pro-