A handbook on leprosy.

  • Impey, S. P. (Samuel Patton)
Date:
1896
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A handbook on leprosy. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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    every part of the healthy skin is alive in a greater or less degree to each of the three sensations above mentioned. Yet, in the anaesthetic patch of leprosy, we find that a certain part of the skin is deprived of the power of touch, that another cannot discriminate between heat and cold, though it can feel pain, and that, though a third part may have the sense of feeling, injury does not cause pain. This most interesting point requires elucidation. The ansesthetic patches, though of great interest and importance from a diagnostic point of view, are of little vital importance, for excepting that they somewhat dis- figure the body and throw a little more work on the internal organs, they have but a small, if any, effect on the health of the patient. Other nerves besides those above referred to are, how- ever, affected by the leprotic poison, and it is by their destruction that so much mischief is done. Those of the extremities and face become diseased and more or less destroyed, and it is by their disorganisation that leprosy has become such a terror in the land, for this wholesale destruction of the messengers of life cannot but be followed by terrible results. The dread symptoms commence so insidiously that the disease is generally well advanced before its nature is discerned, and the premonitory symptoms being like those of febricula the disease may very readily pass without recognition in its early stages. Even the erythematous patches may not at first awaken suspicion, and it is gener- ally only when the anaesthesia is detected that the true nature of the terrible disease is grasped. I have already discussed the ansesthetic patches, and will now turn to the much more important changes caused by the destruction of the larger nerves of the extremities and face.