Clinical lectures and essays on abdominal and other subjects / by H. D. Rolleston.

  • Rolleston, Humphry Davy, Sir, 1862-1944.
Date:
1904
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Clinical lectures and essays on abdominal and other subjects / by H. D. Rolleston. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    Does the poison of an acute disease act on the cells of the cerebral cortex and render them incapable of continuing their riotous behaviour ? Does it act as in former days a counter-irritant was thought to act— viz. neutralising the pre-existing lesion by setting up an additional morbid process ? Of these hypotheses to explain the cure of chorea by acute disease the former is the more probable, while both are more likely to be true than that the poison ■of the second disease directly neutralises that of the first. These considerations are of interest in connection with the rationale of the treatment of chorea by arsenic. Does arsenic cure chorea because it makes the patient ill in another way, and unable to manifest the original •disease ? This seems unlikely in ordinary practice, where the toxic effects of the drug are hardly likely to be pushed too far. On the other hand it might be urged that arsenic is less successful in ordinary practice than in the hands of the successful quack in Newcastle, who gained a great reputation by giving heroic doses of arsenic. \Vide p. 146.] In some instances it is said that an acute disease like pneumonia or typhoid fever may so interfere with the •evolution of the secondary stage of syphilis that the latter is postponed for several months; possibly in some cases the primary infection is completely cured by the intervention of some acute disease, and the disease does not appear at all; if so, the occurrence of this happy cure is withheld from our knowledge. If scarlet fever or measles supervene in the com’se of whooping cough, the whoop is often entirely dropped during the febrile access, to return when the temperature becomes normal.^ I have heard of influenza removing the pain of * Caiger, “ Co-existence of Infectious Diseases,” Allbutt's System of Medicine, vol. ii. p. 291.