On hydatids of the lung : their diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment, and observations on their relations to pulmonary consumption, and other diseases of the chest / by S. Dougan Bird.

  • Bird, Samuel Dougan, 1832-1904.
Date:
1874
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On hydatids of the lung : their diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment, and observations on their relations to pulmonary consumption, and other diseases of the chest / by S. Dougan Bird. 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.

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    and settles the case at once without any difficulty or trouble beyond the use of a quarter or even half inch lens. But a personal microscopic examination should always be made. Patients have often de- scribed their sputa to me as containing things exactly like the skins of grapes, which on examina- tion proved to be only flakes of tough and hardened mucus. But when the cyst is still entire, and no definite information can be got from the examination of the sputa, we must fall back upon a systematic physical examination of the chest, by which, aided in some cases, but not all, by the general symptoms, a positive diagnosis may be formed; a successive exclusion of morbid states within the thorax other than hydatid, which may give rise to a group of signs more or less resembling it, being the safest and most scientific method of procedure. When doubt still exists, an exploratory puncture is not only allowable, but may be looked upon as necessary, (for reasons which will be given Z7i extenso farther on), such an operation not only setting the diagnosis beyond doubt, but being the first step in curative treatment. In this colony we have become so familiar with the existence of hydatid cysts in the viscera, discovered during life or found unexpectedly post mortem, that we are always justified in con- cluding that an otherwise unexplained internal tu- mour, especially if it be painless, is in all probability a hydatid.