The physiological & pathological relations of the voice and speech / by John Syer Bristowe.

Date:
1880
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The physiological & pathological relations of the voice and speech / by John Syer Bristowe. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

    94/172 (page 78)
    affected ; and the immediate cause of death was inter- current pneumonia. On admission into the hospital his voice was a hoarse whisper, and it had been so for six weeks; but he had not had, nor had he then, either cough or dyspnoea. The right vocal cord acted well, but the left was motionless in the position of almost complete closure. The paralysis of the left vocal cord and the feebleness and hoarseness of voice were per- sistent up to his death, which occurred three months after admission ; yet, although during the last three or four weeks of his life symptoms of pulmonary disease, with cough and expectoration, got developed, he never suffered from dyspnoea, far less from severe paroxysmal attacks of it. During the last two months he had a manifest difficulty in swallowing fluids, which had a tendency to pass into his windpipe. At the post mortem examination, the lungs, trachea, and oesophagus were found healthy; but the left recurrent laryngeal was involved and lost in a carcinomatous tumour about as large as a filbert. Now in both of these cases there was clear proof afforded by the autopsy that the patients were the subjects of complete destruction of the recurrent laryn- geal ; and it is certain that during life they had suffered from those symptoms which a priori, I think, we should be inclined to attribute to that lesion—namely, impair- ment of laryngeal intonation, and (at any rate, in one of them) difficulty in preventing the entrance of fluids into the trachea; but there was no trace of dyspnoea, either persistent or paroxysmal.