On some rare and new diseases : suggestions for the study of part of the natural history of disease : the Bradshawe lecture delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1882 / by Sir James Paget.

Date:
1883
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On some rare and new diseases : suggestions for the study of part of the natural history of disease : the Bradshawe lecture delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1882 / by Sir James Paget. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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

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    logue. This might not seem very strange in the case of specimens troublesome or expensive to keep, or in such as are said to ‘show nothing.’ But these are very striking deviations from health, very plainly to be seen, and dry bones are neither costly nor troublesome to keep. We have large numbers of them collected by Hunter, Howship, Langstaff, Liston, Cooper, Stanley and others, who col- lected, not merely illustrations of diseases well known to them, but whatever was curious, whether it were under- stood or not. They would have looked on these bones as gems. I might repeat this statement in nearly every particular concerning M. Charcot’s disease. I believe there is not an old specimen in our museums. There is not one in the Musee Dupuytren; I cannot find a notice or an illustra- tion of one.1 And yet this disease is now so far from being very rare that Dr. Buzzard has had nine cases under his eye at one time, and several have in recent years been shown in our societies. Let me adduce one more instance of what I believe to have been new diseases within this century, though the museum-evidence is not so strong as in those of which I have been speaking. Many believe, and, I think, quite rightly, that instances of typical gout, such as gained for it the name ‘podagra,’ have lately become comparatively rare, and that a large number of less acute diseases, regarded as forms of incomplete or suppressed gout, are much more frequent. It may be that some or many of these lesser forms were always as common as they are now, but were overlooked or were not distinguished from 1 Mr. Eve (St. Bartholomew's Hospital (Reports, vol. xvii. 1881) points out a case by Mr. Stanley, in the Medico-Chirurgical Transactions, vol. xxiv. p. 122, 1841, which was certainly one of locomotor-ataxy and in which both femora were dislocated. But there does not appear to have been any marked change in the head of either bone before its displacement.