Syphilitic affections of the nervous system : and a case of symmetrical muscular atrophy with other contributions to the pathology of the spinal marrow / by Thomas Reade.

  • Reade, Thomas.
Date:
1867
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Syphilitic affections of the nervous system : and a case of symmetrical muscular atrophy with other contributions to the pathology of the spinal marrow / by Thomas Reade. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    82/128 (page 70)
    ledge lie lived a life of reckless profligacy, witli a profuse waste of money, to the gratificatioii of all his animal propensities. Such was the slight sketch I gave Mr. Cusack of the subject of consultation, adding further my own direct knowledge of him. About eighteen months prior to his epileptic seizure he had come to me to ask my advice for an eruption which largely covered the trunk, with ulceration of the throat, both of indisputable venereal character. I commenced to treat him with mercury, which acted most kindly, and his symptoms of the throat and skin yielded with a regular and steady progress. When the visible signs of the constitutional afiection had disappeared, but prior to my dismissing him from my care, he pleaded indispensable business to leave for eight days. It was, indeed, much opposed to my judgment to allow the journey. He, on arriving in a capital city, at once resumed all his habitual courses of profligate debauchery and extravagance. He aban- doned all control, and ceased to be my patient until I again was summoned to visit him after his epileptic seizure. Mr. Cusack required him to be stripped, and together we made as careful an investigation as his experience of disease could suggest. Mr. Cusack said, and I acknow- ledged, that, as regarding visible or tangible symptoms to sustain an opinion that the cerebral distress was based on syphilitic constitutional contamination, there was no proof; and he considered that the redundant nourishment of his physical frame rather denoted a treatment to reduce the supply of nutritious matter, and to put hira on a very spare regimen, merely adequate to subsistence. This plan was duly and fully