Clinical lectures on diseases of the nervous system : delivered at the National Hospital for the Paralysed and Epileptic, London / by W.R. Gowers.

  • Gowers, W. R. (William Richard), 1845-1915.
Date:
1895
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Clinical lectures on diseases of the nervous system : delivered at the National Hospital for the Paralysed and Epileptic, London / by W.R. Gowers. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

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    about two months. The patient presented indications of a sub-chronic local cerebral lesion, with headache and optic neuritis. These two general cerebral symptoms with the onset indicate that the local process is a growth. More- over, there was a history of active syphilis; and we know that whenever we have evidence of a local growth of rather rapid course in the subject of syphilis the probability is very great that the growth is syphilitic. They are much less if the growth is very chronic, and this point is important. The patient was treated according to the diagnosis. He was not under my care, although he was under my con- stant observation; I was then Medical Registrar to the Hospital, and he was under the care of Dr. Hughlings Jackson, from whom it was my privilege to learn many lessons of ever-increasing value, and not the least important were connected with this case. After the patient's dis- charge from the hospital he was under my care as an out- patient, of late years only seen occasionally, chiefly for the benefit he is always ready to give to others as an illus- tration. When he first came to the hospital he was lame, as he is now, and he presented the complexion aspect you see, but in a greater degree. An inquiry into his history showed that two years previously he had been an in-patient at a general hospital, under the care of a physician then well known, who has now been dead many years. The symp- toms he then presented were those of a small syphilitic growth pressing on one side of the spinal cord, and causing effects that we now know to be very characteristic. For those symptoms he was treated with nitrate of silver, and his skin acquired the aspect which it has never lost. When he came here he had improved, and I think, for several reasons: it is exceedingly likely that after the nitrate of silver had been given for a considerable time, without other result, mercury was substituted. At any rate, the affection