[A guide to the treatment of diseases of the skin / by T. Hunt].

  • Hunt, Thomas.
Date:
[1859]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: [A guide to the treatment of diseases of the skin / by T. Hunt]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

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    principles on which, as it appears to me, our practice in skin diseases, and local diseases generally, should be invariably founded. That diseases do occasionally attack two or more organs or regions in succession, which have no direct continuity of parts, or special vascular relation to each other, and that in this translation of morbid action from place to place, a mutation or conversion sometimes occurs, that is, a change in the character of the disease as well as in its locality,—these are well established and, as far as I know, universally admitted facts. The manner in which these changes have been ex- plained by different writers, has been sufficiently contradictory and confused to shew that the subject is imperfectly understood. Nevertheless, authors of repute have spoken with confidence, and even with dogmatism, of the salutary nature of certain diseases of local or superficial seat, describing them as protective and prophylactic, and as manifesting a condition of the system which forbids all interference, whether surgical or medical; inasmuch as it is alleged, that they cannot be cured without risk of the morbid action being transferred to some important, or vital organ. In inquiring into the origin of this somewhat popular conceit, I was naturally led to place all the dis- eases described by different writers as salutary dis- orders, in a class by themselves; in order to see if any common property could be found in each of them which would both identify them as belonging to so dis- tinguished a group, and explain the nature of their protective power. But they do not appear to have any one pathological property in common. Some consist