The relation of alimentation and disease / by J.H. Salisbury.

  • Salisbury, James Henry, 1823-1905.
Date:
1888
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The relation of alimentation and disease / by J.H. Salisbury. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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

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    ■A. The first period of this stage is confined to fermentation of vegetables, breads, fruits and sweets in the stomach. This goes on for a longer or shorter time, according to the kind and character of the food and drinks, the exercise, exposure and habits. After this period has advanced sufficiently to paralyze the stomach and the valve 1 at the pyloric end of the organ, the fermenting food ceases to remain long in the stomach, on ac- count of the relaxed and open condition of the pyloric valve which, up to this point, has been closed and unusually rigid. If the first period (A) of the disease continues for a long time, as it frequently does, during which time the stomach is constantly filled with carbonic acid gas (much of which may be eructated, but the greater part of which is absorbed), the heart, diaphragm, and portal organs become sluggish, enervated, and more or less paralyzed. The circulation grows weak ; the feet are cold, with a tendency to numbness ; head more or less dizzy and full; por- tal glands and kidneys sluggish ; urine loaded with bile and lithates ; bowels often constipated; breathing often oppressed ; pulse slow and often intermittent; and in the later stages, the feet swell during the day. If this state of things be allowed to continue for any great length of time, there is great danger of fatty disease of the heart, and sometimes of fatty or amyloid disease of the liver and spleen. The cause of this fatty disease is the partial paralysis of these organs, which finally becomes so great that there is not sufficient vitality and action in the parts to bring to them their proper nourishment; and nature, to pre- vent dissolution of the elements of the organs, infiltrates fat into them, by means of which they are preserved. Occasion- ally, in this period of the disease, the lobular or glycogenic por- tion of the liver becomes congested, by having the branch of 1 When fermentation in the stomach first sets in, the pyloric valve closes with un- usual force, so as to prevent the passage of the poisonous yeasts into the bowels below, and there is a tendency to eructate and throw up the fermenting products, till the whole organ becomes too much paralyzed to contract, when the pyloric valve relaxes and the fermenting materials pass readily into the small bowels, which ush- ers in the second stage of the disease.