Lectures: chiefly clinical.

  • Chambers, Thomas King, 1818-1889.
Date:
1864
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Lectures: chiefly clinical. 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.

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    tory of the soul because it is so true. We are all ready enough to admit that when a patient is in danger, the first thing to be dofie is to keep him alive. Let us act in the same way when he is not in danger; cure him by keeping up the partially or locally failing life. Postpone partial death, as you would postpone total death. ■ (11.) Disease of destruction, or deficient moulting, arises when the functions whose business it is to remove effete products from the tissues are inefficient. I say functions designedly instead of organs, in order to include the whole process from the period when the tissue becomes effete to the expulsion of the products of its decay from the body. For in whatever part of the process a check takes place, the result on the whole health is identical, and the principles, though not perhaps all the details, of the treatment must be the same. And in whatever part a check takes place, the main injury is the stoppage of vital metamorphosis at its origin. This is the case even in mere mechanical obstruction. Take for instance the impaction of a gall-stone in the common duct; first, the intestines are in want of bile—that is a deficiency they can easily bear; then the gall-bladder and ducts get distended—which does not interfere very much with the patient's comfort; but the real serious injury is the non-removal from the blood and tissues of what forms the biliary secretion. And the injury is of exactly the same nature, whether the jaundice arises in the mechanical way alluded to, or whether it arises in the ultimate tissues themselves, as jaundice from mental im- pression for example. It might seem at first sight as if diseases of deficient moulting were exceedingly easy to detect, and to reduce to classification. We are in a position to measure accurately the quantity and quality of tlie most important excretions, and can approximate to a knowledge of those not so readily reckoned. We can know by experiment the daily excretion of urea, phosphoric acid, sulphuric acid, and water by the kidneys; of carbonic acid by the lungs; of fECces by the bowels; of water and salts by the