Personal experience of lithotomy in India / by William Curran.

  • Curran, William, 1927-
Date:
1871
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Personal experience of lithotomy in India / by William Curran. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    producing or aggravating the tendency to stone that exists in India, it is clearly inoperative in that direction elsewhere. Others hold that it depends in great measure, at least, on the quality of the food used by the natives, and the immunity in this respect enjoyed by flesh-eating Eurasians and Europeans would seem to lend some support to this hypothesis. But stone is very prevalent in certain parts of Persia, and also, but to a lesser extent, in the interior of Cabul and along the banks of the Oxus—as I learned from traders—where the inhabitants are all Mahomedans, who eat flesh and live in some other respects like Europeans. I have heard it more than once ascribed in conversation with friends in India, to the predominance of the vegetable or coarsely powdered materials of their food, and to the absence of that regulated admix- ture and combination of those nitrogenous elements that are con- sidered essential to health, and which are so little cultivated by the poorer class of natives. This view has the support of analogy in its favour, inasmuch as a similar prevalence obtains in parts of the Highlands of Scotland, in Norfolk in England, and near Malaga in Spain, in the first and last of which places, the poor, as is well known, live largely on barley meal and the products of the vine, while the want of apples, pears, cider, and other articles of that description has been said to conduce towards its causation and development in the latter. Certain it is that the miserable mills used by the poorer class of natives are but ill adapted for grinding, and the kind of corn or rather pulse they use has a hard, horny, coriaceous rind. But it is not easy to see how particles of this could enter the bladder, and yet an impression to that effect pre- vails largely elsewhere. ■ When on a visit to Malaga, in June, '58, I called on the late Dr. Sutliffe, who then practised there, and who possessed a considerable local experience and repute. He showed me several specimens of calculi he had extracted on the spot, and he assured me that the disease was comparatively common in the neighbourhood. He unhesitatingly ascribed its pi'evalence to the wine which is manufactured in the vicinity, and which the peasantry are so fond of, and to the use of a species of bread which is made of maize and the husks of the vine, and which is of a coarse, indigesti- ble and gritty nature. Whether any similar effect can be ascribed to the barley meal of the Highlanders, I cannot say, but stone 1 Dr. Cameron informs me that lime is found in considerable quantity in the drinking water in this country, and he added that he believed stone is less freqnent in Dublin than it used to be before the introduction of the soft Vartry water.