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.

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    such a statistical point in medicine. Boerhaave and Van Swieten also would appear to favour the opinion of the modern origin of rickets. Glisson is the first, I believe, who has fully and accurately- written upon the disease; and it is a little re- markable that its name (of Greek derivation, from pa^ig, spine, or chine) was not the sug- gestion of that author, but was the common appellation by which the complaint was known and spoken of at the time he wrote his treatise upon it. (Glisson de Bachitide, published about the middle of the seventeenth century). Not a few writers, with whom I am much dis- posed to agree, are of opinion that the disease of rickets, in a mild or aggravated form, existed at all times, and was comprehended and recognised in the general morbid state of cachexy. The following is a description of a morbid con- dition of a boy, given by a physician of Bologna, Johannes Baptista Theodosius, in 1554, a century before the rickets was noticed by any writer in this country; and if a similar case were to come under my observation to-morrow, I would have no hesitation in pronouncing it, with the fullest confidence in the correctness of my diagnosis, to be rickets:—Ejus temperamentum declinat ad frigidam et humidam, ex quo color totius pallidus