Surgical tracts, containing a treatise upon ulcers of the legs : together with hints on a successful method of treating some scrophulous tumors ; and the mammary-abscesses, and sore nipples of lying-in women / [Michael Underwood].

  • Underwood, Michael, 1736-1820.
Date:
1788
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Surgical tracts, containing a treatise upon ulcers of the legs : together with hints on a successful method of treating some scrophulous tumors ; and the mammary-abscesses, and sore nipples of lying-in women / [Michael Underwood]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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

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    Arable from the vail coldnefs of the feet and toes of people of a delicate habit, in whom, indeed, they are leldom warm but in the hotter months. The fad is certainly incontrovertible, the vis vitae is actually lefs than in luperior parts ; and wounds occafioned mere- ly by accident, and under every favorablecircumftance of age, conflitution, &c. and brought into a good date, are found to cicatrize more flowly than on other parts of the body: whilft no wound'heals fo foon an/ where as on the head, let the natural conflitution be whatever it may. As to nervous influence, which the objection alludes to, there may be enough of it, of a certain kind, for any thing I know, and perhaps often more than we wifh for; no fores being more irritable than thofe of the legs. And if I have appeared to Intimate, that the lower extremities are enervated, it was intended in fuch a fenfe only as to denote their atonic flate, for want of a due vis vit^, a fad: not to be denied ; and I have no doubt, has for its caufe the languid circulation in the parts. This, as well as every other inflance of the animal ceconomy is, in- dubitably, wife and falutary on the whole, though it will not follow that it is conducive to the healingof ul- cers fo circumflanced; and will ferve to illuflrate the propriety of a meafure of that exercife which nature has evidently deflgned the legs to fuflain, and which is fo much infilled upon in the courfe of this work.* § The * The idea of a defe<fl of vital energy in the part, has lately met with farther fupport from experiment, or rather from fa<5ts; which