A theoretical and practical treatise on the hemorrhoidal disease : giving its history, nature, causes, pathology, diagnosis and treatment / by William Bodenhamer.

  • Bodenhamer, William, 1808-1905.
Date:
1884
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A theoretical and practical treatise on the hemorrhoidal disease : giving its history, nature, causes, pathology, diagnosis and treatment / by William Bodenhamer. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    which neither'denotes the seat northe nature of the affection for which ii was coined. Many of the ancients, however, previous to the time of Galen, used the term hemorrhoids in its literal sense, namely, as synonymous with hemorrhage in general, a license which its e'tymological signification so readily admits, the terms hemor- rhoids and In umrrlixtj, being substituted for each other or used in- terchangeably, and considered synonymous. It was in this sense that the Greeks applied the term aimorrhoidas to the bloody ser- pent {Colliber Redi of Linnaeus) whose bite produced death from hemorrhage. Hippocrates, on the contrary, however, confined the use of the word hemorrhoids solely to a flow of blood from the anus, and speaks of it as being an affection of the anus only : Ex- cretiones per ora venarum quae sunt in ano haemorrhoidas vocant. {De Alimento Liber—ILippocratis Opera Omnia Greece et Latins, ab A mttio Foe'sio. Tome 1, p. 381, folio, Geneva?, 1657.) Galen, like his great prototype, generally designated under the name hemorrhoids a flux or a flow of blood from the veins of the rectal portion of the large intestine, which veins, says he, are furnished at their extremities with cotyledons, like those of the uterus during gestation. He also adds that he learned this fact from Praxagoras. Elsewhere, however, Galen says that hemorrhage differs from hemorrhoids in this, that the former is an abundant effusion of blood, whilst the latter is only a flow of blood which takes place lit- tle by little. {De Finitiones Medicos Liber: et De Compositione Medicamentorum Localium. Lib. LX. 8vo. Galeni Opera Om- nia, Greece et Latine, a Kuhn. Lipsce, 1821.) It will be perceived that Galen used the term hemorrhoids to denote a passive, not an active hemorrhage, and that he seemed to be aware also that the bleeding did not proceed from a rupture or a laceration of the vessels of the rectum, or from erosion or ulcera- tion of the mucous membrane of the same, but by an exhalation, an exudation, or by a true stillicidium from the mucous surface. Aitken defines hemorrhoids to be a hemorrhage from the vessels near the anus. {Elements of the Theory and Practice of Physic and Surgery, Vol. L, p. 149. 8vo. London, 1783). The learned Sauvages employed the term hemorrhoids to denote a flux or a flow of blood from the rectum and anus only : Fluxus cruentus ex podiee vel recto mariscis ruptis obsito. {Nosologia Methodicce, Vol. LL,p. 323. 4to. Amslelcedami, 1768).