A paper on the management of the shoulders, in examinations of the chest : including a new physical sign : read before the New York Academy of Medicine / by John W. Corson.

  • Corson, John W., 1816-1882.
Date:
1859
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A paper on the management of the shoulders, in examinations of the chest : including a new physical sign : read before the New York Academy of Medicine / by John W. Corson. 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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    ten minutes to dinner, or forgotten it; or a thin,nervous book- keeper lias for years narcotized digestion with tobacco. Some journeyman tailor has spent weeks of fasting, nights sitting like a Turk on his board ; or an ambitious clerk, from a home of plenty in the country, has come to pine on a slender salary in a city warehouse, till, like the caged monkeys of Paris, he emaciates with tubercles. Or, like a gentle departed spirit we once knew, a rigid vegetarian, forgetting his mother's milk, his own canine teeth, and the great fact that the race in mercy pass through omnivorous from the pole to the equator—has actually wilted, like a plant, with the strange fancy, that eating flesh is the root of all evil. Extremes meet. A fine lady in a splendid mansion, who neither toils nor spins, but lives largely by gaslight, loses her relish, and wastes away suspiciously; while a poor widow, weakened by watching the sick departed, in a neigh- boring garret, at the same midnight hour, is silently acting the song of the shirt, with a hacking accompaniment, till hunger is drowned in grief. Imprisonment, and sorrow, and want together tell fearfully. Early and late, in all weathers, a slender orphan girl, gliding past like a dark spectre, bash- fully veiled, and too virtuous to sell soul and body for more, thus toiling for the barest decencies of better days, has lived on bread and tea, till a hollow cough tells she will soon enter the close, dusty work-shop no more forever. In a word, on careful study we discover that^ in all its various forms, the prevailing cause of consumption is depraved nutrition. It is from poor chyle, converted into impoverished blood, that within the meshes of the lungs, according to Laen- nec, or on them, by the theory of Carswell, we have deposited the fatal sediment of tubercles. And this bad nourishment, a^ain, may from an inherited weak frame, poor food, or no stomach to eat it, prostration from foul or dusty air, grief or mental depression, excessive study, sedentary con- finement, or few or many of the agencies pictured above. In the name of the physic of two thousand years, can we not do something to arrest these? We can. From the marks enumerated and the family history, we can often fortify hereditary consumptives long in advance, and ward off threatened attacks. But, with the predisposed and all others, at the first warning, the spitting of blood, tickling couo-h, wasting or faint physical signs, we must promptly refo?m all these abuses. It is time to bring up all our forces. Thousands thus sin against the laws of health unconsciously. Esvecially will they deny a feeble appetite or trashy diet A 1 the antecedents must be known, and the whole lite regulated.