Hay fever : its causes, treatment, and effective prevention. Experimental researches / by Chas. Harrison Blackley.

  • Blackley, Charles Harrison, 1820-1900.
Date:
1880
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Hay fever : its causes, treatment, and effective prevention. Experimental researches / by Chas. Harrison Blackley. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    mean to say that it must be, therefore, a mode of intermit- tent disease, but he thinks, from the circumstance of its having a quotidian period and being the produce of heat and vegetation, it at least presents features of analogy which render it worthy of being noticed in his work, and also of being more minutely studied ; as far, at least, as we can investigate a disorder generally too trifling to attract much notice.’ § 33. A paper published by Mr. T. Wilkinson King* is chiefly remarkable for the manner in which the author mistakes the true character of liay-fever, and for the way in which it helps to confuse, rather than to clear up, the subject in the mind of the reader. Mr. King had suffered from the disease, he says, for about fourteen years, and thought it worth while ‘ to set dov/n his own conclusions, together with an additional fact or two,’ so that he might ^ point to and confirm more general views of disease.’ The various causes of the local irritations as given in books, Mr. King thinks are more curious than instructive, and, after noticing the various conditions which affect asthmatic patients favourably and unfavourably, he goes on to say: ‘ The preceding and countless vagaries are to be accounted for by simple principles. (Vide a series of papers on ‘Angina,’ Medical Gazette, 1841.) We have to calculate that according to circumstances, a certain number of hours having elapsed after exposure (specific or general), eating or lying down, capillary excitement or distention is to be evinced by uneasiness, obstruction, and various forms and quantities of secretion. Beyond this, we believe very few of the phenomena of hay-fever or asthma will remain unre- solved. The time at which the affections prevail is the time of diminishing our clothing. It seems to me, in the first place, not unreasonable to compare these affections with summer eruptions .... I think I have, at different times, experienced most of the symptoms described by Dr. Bostock, hut not only in summer. I am subject to slight attacks of * ‘ On Summer Asthma, Catarrhus .^Estivus, or Hay-Fever: its Causes and Treatment,’ by T. Wilkinson King. London Medical Gazette, 1842—1843, vol. ii. pp. 671—676.