Lecture on mercurial trade disease / by E.D. Mapother.

  • Mapother, E. D. (Edward Dillon), 1835-1908.
Date:
1866
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Lecture on mercurial trade disease / by E.D. Mapother. 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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    enough, or poison enough, to produce much effect on the brain or muscles, but the increased action of the liver would rapidly impoverish the blood. Mercury has been# moreover, found in the blood, but so intimately combined with albumen that destructive distillation was necessary to extract it, and a decomposed form of albumen was found also in the blood. Lead, you know, produces a palsy of the extensor muscles of the forearm (why these muscles alone is unex- plained), and this is probably due to the direct action of the lead on their tissue, or on the posterior interosseous nerve which supplies them. I must acknowledge that it weakens my theory of the mercurial palsy, for it cannot be on the blood the lead has acted, else the forearm alone could not suffer. In a case of wasting palsy, in which a few muscles only were affected, Mr. Lockhart Clarke showed that the lesion in the spinal cord corresponded with the origin in that centre of the nerves which supplied them. Treatment So much depends on a knowledge of the intimate nature of the affection that you will not be sur- prised to hear that there is much uncertainty about it. Believing that the disease consists in a want of good red blood, which the poison has spoiled, I would advise the most nutritious food, fresh air, and iron to improve it. Such treatment is in a few weeks capable of tripling the red cells. Pereira regards medicines as of no use, but others look on iodide of potassium as a specific, and believe that it acts by making a soluble compound with the mercury which escapes in the urine. This view is improbable, for the conversion into a soluble form of the poison should aggravate its effects as it circulated through the system, and the iodide of lead which would be pro - duced in a similar manner in lead poisoning treated with iodide of potassium, is insoluble. The medicine may act by eliminating the albuminoid which has been