The diseases of children / by James Frederic Goodhart.

  • Goodhart, James Frederic, Sir, 1845-1916.
Date:
1894
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The diseases of children / by James Frederic Goodhart. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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

    611/792 (page 595)
    to be mentioned. Thus, four cases complained only of extreme pain in the side, which, in the absence ot local inflammations of pleura or pericardium, must, I suppose, be attributed to a rheumatic muscular condition. The neck was alone affected once, the pericardium alone once. I have no note of anything that could have been called meningitis. At the .same time, 1 have occasionally seen cases of meningitis in children with rheumatic family history, which have raised, though, unfortunately, not solved, the question of a rheuma^tic lymphangitis of this kind. The fever has o-enerally been of the most moderate, or at any rate has easily been controlled by drugs. In the last ten cases taken from my note-books, which are a very fair sample of the usual run of such cases, the longest duration of any i-heumatic symptoms was four days, except in two cases, where bad peri- and endo-carditis complicated the disease. Contrary to the opinion of some, I should say that relapses are \uicommon ; but I must add that this statement is based upon cases treated almost invariably by salicylate of soda or salicin. In making this statement I am speaking of such recurrences of the disease as have some definite time- relation to the primary attack—that is to say, which occur within a few days or a week or two of each other; and I must also exclude what might perhaps be considered of the nature of a relapse, the onset of chorea as the rheumatism subsides. Children, like adults, once they have had rheumatism, are liable to recurrent attacks of pain of no great severity. As I have already said, these are by no means to be made light of, since they possess a well-known tendency to associate themselves with lesions of the heart and its valves ; but I incline to consider these as fresh attacks, or indicative of the persistence of a statics rheumati- cus rather than as the recrudescence of a worn-out malady. Heart Disease.—As in adults, acute pericarditis