Fat and blood: and how to make them.

  • Mitchell, Silas Weir.
Date:
1882
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Fat and blood: and how to make them. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    I might multiply these histories almost endlessly. In some cases I have cured without fattening; in others, though rarely, the mental habits formed th rough years of illness have been too deeply in- grained for change, and I have seen the patient get up fat and well only to relapse on some slight occasion. The intense persistency with which some women study and dwell upon their symptoms is often the great difficulty. Even a slight physical annoyance becomes for one of these unhappily constituted natures a grave and almost ineradicable trouble, owino; to the habit of self-stud v. * Miss P., set. 29, weight one hundred and eleven pounds, height five feet four inches, dark-skinned, sallow, and covered with the acne of bromidism, consulted me last year. She had had one attack which some one considered to have been epileptic, and which was jjrobably hysterical, but on this matter she dwelt with incessant terror, which was fostered by the tender care of a near relative, who left her neither by night nor day. Vague neuralgic aches in the limbs, with constant weariness, asthenopia, anaemia, loss of appetite, and loss of flesh, followed. Then came spinal pain and irregular menstruation, a long course of local cauterizations of the womb, spinal braces, and endless tonics and narcotics.