Eczema, its nature and treatment : and incidentally, the influence of constitutional conditions on skin diseases, being the Lettsomian lectures for the session 1869-70 delivered before the Medical Society of London / by Tilbury Fox.

  • Fox, Tilbury.
Date:
1870
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Eczema, its nature and treatment : and incidentally, the influence of constitutional conditions on skin diseases, being the Lettsomian lectures for the session 1869-70 delivered before the Medical Society of London / by Tilbury Fox. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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

    75/98 page 67
    strumous plan of treatment. The complications I enu- merated one by one. As regards the stage of an eczema, if there be discharge, no irritant or stimulant treatment should be used. I counselled, in severe cases, the more frequent use of antiphlogistics, antimonials, diuretics, &c, internally, and locally, the entire exclusion of the inflamed part by means of neutral unguents. I spoke of the use, when the chronic stage is reached, of simple astringents, and stimulants in the slighter scaly forms of disease, of tarry preparations in the itchy and papular aspects of eczema, and of the soap treatment where there is much thickening and infiltration. Sir, I believe my three discourses were at least con- nected, and led up gradually to the final conclusions at which I arrived. At least you will, I hope, allow that I have got out of the ordinary rut of dermatologists in the treatment of my subject, in that I have recognised the extensive and important relations which eczema has with numerous disorders of other parts of the body and the system generally. Further, I hope you will allow that I am unfettered by that sad empiricism which has elevated arsenic to the position of a specific for every conceivable cutaneous ailment, and approves the immediate adoption of courses of potent remedies, it would seem, as a kind of a pre- liminary to diagnosis which too often becomes entirely an afterthought, when there is no luck with the empirical tools which the prescriber first employs. The final object of all our talking and observing must be the establishment of a better therapeute of disease. It .seems to me that the propositions I have laid down relative to the pathology and etiology of eczema, enable us to understand in general all the various relations of this malady more clearly than heretofore, and to pre- dicate with much more satisfaction what will agree and what disagree (and the reasons thereof) with the disease in its different forms and stages.
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