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
Catalogue details

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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    frequent in the last fifty years ; and may suspect that not long before Sir Henry Halford’s time it may have been a really new disease. It is hard to believe that it could have been overlooked. Its characters are strongly marked and evident to both eye and touch j it is a very painful, disabling, long-enduring disease, often recurring, some- times observed in several members of the same family, and commonly leaving the affected limb large, heavy, and clumsy for many years. Could this have been overlooked when similar limbs, in consequence of an allied, though not the same, disease, were known and described itx women and while, as it happened, the subject of phlebitis, in its traumatic and pysemial forms, was being very care- fully studied P For there was a form of phlebitis much more common in the last century than in this—the phlebitis that occurred after bleeding. Hunter had studied this very carefully, had written on it, and shown it in these specimens; 1 and after his time, both this and the phlebitis after amputation were well known. Especially after the beginning of this century phlebitis following amputation was thoroughly worked- at. It was only three years before the publication of Sir Henry Halford’s essay that Mr. Arnott’s renowned paper on Inflammation of the Veins was published in the ‘ Medico-Chirurgical Trans- actions.’ 2 In the same volume are the chief papers by Dr. Robert Lee on phlegmasia dolens; and he describes cases of phlebitis associated with pelvic cancer; but not one spontaneous phlebitis is mentioned by either of them. Now, I think that in all these facts there is enough, not, indeed, to prove, but to justify the belief, that we have here examples of diseases, which have appeared in this 1 1722 to 1728. His observations on phlebitis and a case from his MSS. are printed in the Catalogue, 1848, vol. iii. ’ Vol. xv. p. 1.