Miscellaneous contributions to pathology and therapeutics : being a series of original and practical papers on rickets, hydrocephalus, impotence and sterility, pulmonary apoplexy, and haemoptysis, &c. &c. / by James Richard Smyth.

Date:
1844
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Miscellaneous contributions to pathology and therapeutics : being a series of original and practical papers on rickets, hydrocephalus, impotence and sterility, pulmonary apoplexy, and haemoptysis, &c. &c. / by James Richard Smyth. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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

    30/362 (page 14)
    These four cases, now described, present us with examples of profound chronic digestive de- rangement and disease in children, similar, I conceive, in their origins, causes, and natures, but in diflPerent periods of progress, and different states of development. The first case, that of the boy Kates, which will form the subject chiefly of the following observations, is manifestly a case of tabes and rickets; the cause of the tabes being, in this instance, not in the glands of the mesentery, but in a glandular structure of far greater magnitude and importance, namely, the liver. To an examination less accurate with re- spect to the state of the abdominal viscera than that which was given to this case by pressure and percussion, when, as has been seen, it had been some time under treatment, the diagnosis could scarcely have pronounced the affection other than tabes mesenterica. All the symp- toms which are usually considered as peculiar to, and enunciative of, that scrofulous malady were present. There was the large protuberant ab- domen, with the general and severe emaciation in contrast; the voracious appetite; the derange- ment of digestion, and disorder of the functions of the intestinal canal; the irregular hectic fe- verishness, and the diminished temperature of