Mollities ossium in insanity / by W. Carmichael M'Intosh.

  • McIntosh, William Carmichael, 1838-1931.
Date:
1862
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Mollities ossium in insanity / by W. Carmichael M'Intosh. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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

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    The occurrence of mollities ossium^ malacosteon, or osteomalacia in asylums seems to be rare^ although several cases are mentioned in connexion with more or less evident mental disease. Mr Solly ^ gives the case of C. S., 93t. 29, a young woman whose health declined after an attack of scarlet fever at the age of 19. Two years afterwards, from a slight cause, the clavicle was fractured, and never again united. After another accident of a more trivial nature, she became nervous and desponding, and her friends remarked a great difference in her manner; her disposition seemed changed from an open and amiable temper to one of restlessness and sus- picion. They became fearful that she was going out of her mind. After exposure to damp, she had an attack of acute rheumatism. She complained of great pain over the posterior part of the head, and was occasionally violently delirious. At the approach of con- valescence, mania set in, and during its existence she attempted to commit suicide. Mr Solly connects the state of the cranial bones, which were found extensively diseased, with the mental affection, and contrasts the case with that of another patient men- tioned in the same paper, in whom absence of the disease from the bones of the skull co-existed with entire mental faculties. Curling's^ patient, 93t. 72, had been subject to hysterical fits before admission into the hospital. In Litzmann's^ Contributions, six cases are enumerated (4 women and 2 men) where the disease evidently became developed in consequence of profound lesions of the central organs of the nervous system. One of the patients had suffered for years from insanity, another from chronic hydrocephalus, which was produced by a fall on the head at two years of age; the other 4 were of weak intellects, and of these 2 had continued convulsions 1 Med.-Chirurg. Trans., 1844. 2 Med.-Chirurg. Trans., 1836. =^ Translated by Dr M. Duncan, pp. 28 and 29.