Volume 2

Eruptions of the face, head, and hands: with the latest improvements in the treatment of diseases of the skin ... / By T.H. Burgess.

  • Burgess, Thomas H. (Thomas Henry), -1865.
Date:
1849
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Eruptions of the face, head, and hands: with the latest improvements in the treatment of diseases of the skin ... / By T.H. Burgess. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    tegumentary tissue, it appears that it is liable to be mistaken for elephantiasis Grecorum. But the latter disease possesses peculiar characters, which will prevent any error of this kind. For example, the fawn-coloured tint of the skin, the form or shape of the tubercles, which are large, knotty, uneven, and separated by furrows in the skin, the nature of the ulceration, which never destroys the tissues, and finally, the co-existence of the disease on other parts of the body—a circumstance which almost invariably occurs. 4. If the diagnosis is easily made in the two pre- vious cases, it is, on the contrary, attended with con- siderable difficulty when it is necessary to distinguish it from noli me tangere. Although both these dis- eases possess the same destructive tendency, neverthe- less they are different from each other in all other respects. For example, noli me tangere commonly attacks persons well advanced in life, while lupus, as we have already seen, is, generally speaking, a disease of youth. The former is characterized by the evolution of a single tubercle on a hard circumscribed base, and usually affected with deep, lancinating pain, whilst the tubercles of lupus are developed in the superficial layers of the skin, and are invariably indolent. Finally, noli me tangere is accompanied by tumefaction of the soft parts, sometimes to a very considerable extent; and once ulceration has commenced, it destroys not only skin and cartilage, but also the bones in the vicinity of the diseased parts, which never occurs in lupus. Moreover, the cancerous ulcerations are