Addresses on surgical subjects / by Sir Berkeley Moynihan.

  • Berkeley Moynihan
Date:
1928
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Addresses on surgical subjects / by Sir Berkeley Moynihan. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    corsets or loosens them; great epigastric discomfort which may involve the right side also or pierce through to the back; early satiety during a meal, a feeling that when a small meal is taken the stomach is overfull; a sudden unaccountable sensation of intolerable nausea, described very often as ‘sea-sickness’; a feeling of cold associated with slight shuddering, often coming on with great reg¬ ularity; acidity and ‘water-brash.’” None of these symptoms is severe and none striking. It is in association and persistence rather than in individual character that their importance lies. The complexion of patients is often altered, although they do not realise it. After removal of the infected gall-bladder a patient will often comment upon an improvement in the complexion and remark that it is “as it used to be many years ago.” Now and again in such patients a more acute disturbance of health is noticed; pain and distress in the upper part of the abdomen are associated with local tenderness, with swelling of the liver, whose edge becomes more easily palpable, and with a slight in¬ crease of tenderness. It is as though the whole liver were affected by a slight but transient inflammation. Some months, or years later an attack of hepatic colic occurs, not with the agony associated with the passage of a calculus, but with a rather more subdued but still sufficiently acute pain, which radiates to the right side and pierces through to the shoulder. In an intelligent patient these several steps may all be traced. The criticisms which may properly be urged against this description are that it is vague, and that many of the symptoms are of great frequency, occurring even in those who consider their health quite satisfactory. I am not quite sure that vagueness, however applicable as a
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