On the treatment of deafness : connected with enlargement of the tonsils and other diseases of the throat, and on the consequences arising from the removal of those glands / by William Harvey.

  • Harvey, William, 1807-1876.
Date:
1851
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the treatment of deafness : connected with enlargement of the tonsils and other diseases of the throat, and on the consequences arising from the removal of those glands / by William Harvey. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    patient into jeopardy, by interfering with the func- tion of respiration, and that this circumstance, in imminent cases, may necessitate excision. To this I beg to reply—1st, that after a rather considerable experience, which has extended over fifteen or six- teen years, I never met a case where, in tonsillar enlargement, the danger to life was so imminent as to render excision necessary; nor, 2ndly, even ad- mitting such a case to occur, as that enlargement of the tonsils should, by the obstruction presented to the respiration, occasion any danger to life; the cause of the danger being decidedly of a mechanical nature, relief may not be had by the removal of only a portion of the gland, and on one side only. In truth, the advocates of the operation of excising the tonsils seem to me to look no farther than the throat itself; they seem to think that the presence or absence of these two bits of flesh is an affair of perfect indifference; totally forgetting, or perhaps never having known, the important place these bodies hold in the animal economy; the close and intimate sympathies which they have with other and distant organs in the body. These sympathies are well known to, and fully admitted by, some of the best physiologists of the present time. Dr. Laycock, in his interesting work On the Nervous Diseases of Women, when considering the relations of the glan- dular tissues to the organs of generation, says, § 64, The glandular tissues are those remaining to be