The water-cure in chronic disease : an exposition of the causes, progress and terminations of various chronic diseases of the digestive organs ... and of their treatment by water, and other hygienic means / by James Manby Gully.

  • Gully, James Manby, 1808-1883.
Date:
[1847?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The water-cure in chronic disease : an exposition of the causes, progress and terminations of various chronic diseases of the digestive organs ... and of their treatment by water, and other hygienic means / by James Manby Gully. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    49/476 (page 31)
    those afflicted with either. You never see a phlegmatic nature attacked by rheumatism or tic, and very rarely by gout. In the extension, then, of chronic visceral irritation in the forms of rheumatic, gouty, and neuralgic disorder, we have still the phenomenon of organic extension, that is, from the centre to the circumference of the ganglionic system of nerves; but we have, in addition, the pheno- menon of pain, indicative of extension from the same visceral irritation to the spinal cord, producing therein an action which is the cause of the pain experienced in the external affected parts. Let both these facts be well borne in mind; they bear much on the scientific treatment of the diseases in point. As, in the instance just considered, the chief extension was to the spinal cord and its nerves^ so in another series of phenomena connected with the animal nervous system, the extension is particularly to the brain. These jiheno- mena are collectively called nervousness or neuro2Dathy, and may be sufficiently intense to deserve the names of mono- mania and insanity. In the former, the amount of irrita- tion in the ganglionic centre is not so extreme as to maintain, though it is sufficient to generate, an irregular circulation in the brain. Hence we find that nervousness is brought into play by surrounding circumstances; the patient being tolerably free from it if withdrawn from external causes of excitement, and prevented from the strong exertion of the will. But in monomaniacal and general insanity, the brain circulation of blood is per- manently deranged, the ideas are continuously confused, and both indicate a degree of chronic ganglionic irritation in the abdomen that is of the most intense character. In these neuropathic and insane instances, as in the neuralgic states last spoken of, a certain organization of the brain for the most part obtains, which renders it obnoxious to the radiation of the ganglionic irritation to its own tissue rather than to other textures of the body. Whilst, how- ever, this is admitted, it must not be supposed that in these unfortunate conditions the brain alone is concerned; both one and the other are much more essentially maladies of the nerves of the abdomen than of the brain, the facts and arguments in favour of which I have fully stated in my work, entitled Exposition of the Symjdoms^