The diagnosis and modern treatment of pulmonary consumption : with special reference to the early recognition and the permanent arrest of the disease / by Arthur Latham.

  • Latham, Arthur, 1867-1923.
Date:
1907
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The diagnosis and modern treatment of pulmonary consumption : with special reference to the early recognition and the permanent arrest of the disease / by Arthur Latham. 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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    ment of tuberculosis, were raised after Wright's work was published. More recently there has been some scepticism as to its value. The work is intensely in- teresting, but further experiments, more especially those by Dean, tend to show that our knowledge of the subject is far from being comprehensive, and that it is unwise to make clinical deductions, in the diagnosis or treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis, from this method at present. Value of the As far as my own experience goes, I have not obtained opsonic index in diagnosis, any information of value by the use of the opsonic index in cases of suspected early consumption. Apart from that, however, it may be pointed out that the technique of the method is open to many errors, that it requires a skilled bacteriologist and considerable expenditure of time, and that even then it is probable that the personal error in a given observation may amount to 25 per cent. Again, a man who suffers from active consumption, and whose opsonic index before treatment is low, often does not show any increase in his opsonic index under sanatorium treat- ment. He may have lost all physical signs of active disease, have put on weight, regained his activity, lost all fever, and all bacilli may have disappeared from his sputum, and yet his opsonic index is not increased. In other words, a case which the clinician regards as arrested has an opsonic index of no higher value than a case in the early stages of un- treated tuberculosis. Sanatorium treatment alone, there- fore, in many cases does not do anything to increase the protective substances of the blood, if it be true that the opsonic index is an index of these protective substances. Such a result is necessarily hostile to clinical experience, and should make us pause before accepting the statements concerning opsonic indices at their face value.