Asthma and chronic bronchitis / by John C. Thorowgood.

  • Thorowgood, John C. (John Charles), 1833-1913.
Date:
1894
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Asthma and chronic bronchitis / by John C. Thorowgood. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    14/188 (page 10)
    'Est etiam circa fauces malum, quod apud Grajcos aliud aliudque nomen habet. Omne in difficultate spirandi consistit; sed haec dum modica est, neque ex toto strangulat, 5u<rm/o/a appellatur. Cum vehementior est, ut spirare anger sine sono et anhelatione non possit aa3jia; cum accessit id quoque, ne nisi recta cervice spiritus trahatur nsfoVro/a.' From these lines we see that the Greeks, as quoted by Celsus, confined the term asthma to a difficulty of breath- ing attended with sound, and more severe than the breath - struggle called dyspnoea. Asthma seemed to imply a mean of breath difficulty, while dyspnoea and orthopnoea were terms applied to the two extremes. As knowledge and observation progressed, the inter- mittent character of the breath difficulty of asthma was duly observed and insisted on ; and we find Boissier de Sauvages, in his 'Genera Morborum' (1768), denning asthma as ' difficultas spirandi periodice recurrens, chronica.' We now know that the intermitting or paroxysmal character of a dyspnoea is not enough to mark it at once as spasmodic bronchial asthma. We find paroxysmal dyspncea to be a sign of very different diseases: it may be associated with grave pathological changes of incur- able kind in organs other than the lungs, as, for example, the brain, the heart, or the kidneys. Sir John Floyer wrote on asthma in 1698, and recognised contraction of the bronchia as the cause of asthma. Like many others who have written on asthma, he was himself a great sufferer from the malady, and he often referred the chief seat of his distress to the diaphragm, which seemed to him rigid and spasmodi- cally drawn up by some contractile force within the thorax ; and this force he considered to be the air-tubes