On epilepsy as a result of malarious infection / by A. J. Payne.

  • Payne, Arthur James.
Date:
1865
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On epilepsy as a result of malarious infection / by A. J. Payne. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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

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    \ ON EPILEPSY AS A RESULT OF MALARIOUS INFECTION. By Assist. Surg. A. J. Payne, M. D., BENGAL MEDICAL SEBVICB. If the operation of the paludal poison on the nervous sys- tem, or rather if the many and various symptoms of low nervous vitality, which are produced in the system as secon- dary results of the influence which we call malarious, were watched and their history written, it would recal more per- plexing passages in the experience of Indian physicians, eluci- date more “ anomalous” cases of disease, and furnish the key to more erroneous predictions than almost any contribution that could be made to the medical literature of the east. It may, at first sight, appear surprising that, with the quantity of materials at hand in nearly every part of India, no attempt at such a history should hitherto have been made; but it is not surprising; the pursuit of special subjects in Indian medicine has not prevailed as it has in Europe, and the diffi- culty and obscurity of nervous diseases have probably here, as there, operated as a check at attempts to investigate their causes and mode of origin. It is rather matter of surprise that there should have been any advance in this branch of pathology, as chemistry and the microscope with the great impulse they have given to the minute study of other organs, have thrown little or no light on the morbid changes of the nervous centres. There is, perhaps, no form of nervous disorder, from the most trivial to the most severe, that is not occasionally simu- lated by the action of miasmata on this portion of the system. The possibility of such action has been obscurely hinted at by several Indian writers, and facts, in no scanty quantity, bear- ing on the question have been placed on record in this country as well as in Europe, but the connexion has been enveloped in obscurity, merely intimated, not traced or described or suffi- ciently defined to render it available in diagnosis; and the facts have in several instances, been introduced as exceptional a