A practical compendium of the diseases of the skin, including a particular consideration of the more frequent and intractable forms of these affections; with cases / By Jonathan Green.

  • Green, Jonathan, 1788?-1864.
Date:
1838
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A practical compendium of the diseases of the skin, including a particular consideration of the more frequent and intractable forms of these affections; with cases / By Jonathan Green. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    affairs too, the decoction of sarsaparilla, combined with minute doses of the bichloride (muriate) of mercury, is often found of service. Chalybeates have also been successfully prescribed under similar circumstances. In very obstinate cases of mentagra, the application of the same powerful topical stimulants, which have been mentioned in connection with acne, may be cautiously tried. Mentagra is a more excitable disease than acne, however, and this practice must be resorted to even timidly, and its effects watched with the greatest attention. During the whole course of the disease the razor must be laid aside, the beard being meanwhile clipped short with a pair of flat, curved, and fine scissors. PAPULAE. The diseases included in this natural order are characterised by an eruption of papules, or small, firm, and solid elevations of the skin, the development and progress of which are attended with much and often severe itching, and which terminate in resolution and furfuraceous desquamation. Papular diseases affect, for the most part, the chronic type, though one or two of them do occasionally occur as acute affections, and they continue from a period of a few weeks to one of many months, and even of several years. There is no region of the body upon which they do not occasionally occur, and they frequently affect districts very remote from each other at the same time. On the extremities, the eruption very uniformly occurs on the outer aspects of the limbs, and in the line of extension. The pruritus which attends every form of papular disease, is one of the most characteristic features of the group. The papulae are frequently to be detected rather with the finger than by the eye; for even in the severest forms they are often precisely of the same colour as the integuments upon which they are evolved. In other species of the group, again, the papulae are paler, and in another redder, than the general tint of the skin. The papular diseases belong to no particular period of life; infants at the breast are the usual subjects of one species, and the aged of another form of papular eruption. They are not always, nor even generally, attended with any very evident general consti¬ tutional disturbance; although infants, when labouring under them, commonly show something like irritation of the stomach and bowels. The pruriginous papular affection, of which persons advanced in life are the ordinary victims, is frequently to be traced to privation, and neglect of personal cleanliness. None of the papular diseases are contagious. In themselves the papular diseases are not dangerous affections. Some of them yield readily to very simple measures, others con¬ tinue in spite of every mode of treatment that can be imagined, and render life a misery.