Contributions to practical medicine / by James Begbie.

  • Begbie, James, 1798-1869.
Date:
1862
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Contributions to practical medicine / by James Begbie. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    TO PEACTICAL MEDICINE. i. ON GOUT AND THE GOUTY DIATHESIS. Sydenham has painted gout with the hand of a master; and all who have followed him in the task—and there have been many of the highest class—have, more or less faithfully, copied the picture. But the portrait thus drawn has been that of regular gout, and we still desiderate a fellow in that of the gouty diathesis. While Sydenham and others have made us familiar with the leading features and the more pro- minent characters of the disease, so that what is designated a fit of gout hardly requires a diagnostic mark, we are, never- theless, still ignorant of its real nature, and another artist must arise to draw the lines of its more obscure recesses, and portray its curious essence. Sydenham, writing in 1683, has said that either men will think that the nature of gout is wholly mysterious and incomprehensible, or that a man like myself, who has suffered from it thirty-four years, must be of slow and sluggish dis- position not to have discovered something respecting the nature and treatment of a disease so peculiarly his own. It will be an enlightened age that will bring the charge of slow B