On the loss of weight, blood-spitting, and lung disease / by Horace Dobell.

  • Dobell, Horace, 1828-1917.
Date:
1878
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the loss of weight, blood-spitting, and lung disease / by Horace Dobell. 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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    the “Practitioner,” in 1872, only adding that my subsequent experi- ence, and that of numerous medical friends, has abundantly confirmed what I then wrote :— “ A very interesting article by Dr. Prospero Sonsino, of Pisa, in the September (1872) number of the ‘Practitioner,’ ‘On the Physiological Dyspepsia for Starchy Food in Infancy,’ revives an intention, from which I have been diverted by other occupations, of publishing a few words on an allied subject. “ I propose to speak of the class of cases constituting that wretched form of ‘atrophy and debility’ and ‘marasmus’ in children, in which every part of the body wastes away except the abdomen; the state described by Dr. Druitt, in the last edition of his ‘Vade Mecum,’ in-the following few and graphic words:—‘ Emaciation and voracity; the belly swelled and hard; the skin dry and harsh; the eyes red; the tongue strawberry-coloured; the breath foul; the stools clay- coloured and offensive, sometimes costive, sometimes extremely relaxed; the patient usually dies hectic’ (p. 75). “ I wish to bring prominently forward the fact that this state, provided there is no advanced lung disease, is rapidly cured by Pancreatic Emulsion given in doses of a teaspoonful every four hours, and regularly persisted in till fat and flesh are restored. It is, of course, necessary that a proper diet should be insisted on at the same time ; but proper diet without the Pancreatic Emulsion will not do. This I have found over and over again in cases where everything judicious in the way of feeding and cod-liver oil had been carefully and perseveringly tried without avail, but which, on the addition of the Emulsion to the previous diet, began at once to improve. “ This fact has been familiar to me for a long time; and considering how largely Pancreatic Emulsion is now used in the wasting diseases of adults, I am surprised to find that it is not even referred to in the latest works on the diseases of children. (See p. 195.) . . . Yet scarcely a week now passes but some medical man relates to me cases of the successful use, in his own practice, of Pancreatic Emulsion in the wasting of delicate children. “ Dr. Prospero Sonsino’s paper will, I hope, excite more general attention to this important subject. He, however, has laid all the stress of his observations upon the influence of the salivary and pancreatic juices on the digestion of starch. This is unquestionably a point of the greatest importance in the case of very young children brought up by hand, as showing the absurdity of attempting to nourish them upon starchy food, not artificially digested, before the period of life at which the saliva and pancreatic juice attain their functional activity. And even then, as Dr. Sonsino afterwards remarks, ‘ good reasons make us now believe that really it is not proper to feed infants with copious starchy matters, however these may be rendered digestible.’ 'I'ho s