The effects of climate on tuberculous disease / by Edwin Lee ; and The influence of pregnancy on the development of tubercules / by Edward Warren.

  • Lee, Edwin, -1870.
Date:
1857
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The effects of climate on tuberculous disease / by Edwin Lee ; and The influence of pregnancy on the development of tubercules / by Edward Warren. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

    12/148 (page 18)
    results than have been hitherto attained, under a system of purely pharma- ceutical and often empirical treatment—which, however useful in affording relief for a longer or shorter period, has tended but little, if at all, to dimin- ish the amount of mortality occasioned by the prevalence of pulmonary con- sumption in most parts of the civilized world. The curability of consumption can no longer be reasonably questioned; the fact having been verified in numerous instances of persons who, after having presented all the general and local indications of its existence in various stages of structural lesion, have recovered—living in the enjoyment of toler- able health until a more or less advanced age, when on their succumbing under some other disease, the examination, post-mortem, has revealed the traces of the former malady. Laennec remarked this occurrence on several occasions. MM. Ferrus and Cruveilhier state from the result of their obser- vations upon the bodies of old men and women, who died at the large hos- pitals, Salpetriere and Bicetre, that it is not uncommon to find excavations and other consequences of tuberculous disease which had existed at a former period. More recently, M. Beau stated that 157 out of 160 women who died in his wards in the Salpetriere had cicatrices in the summit of one or other of the lungs, which he considered to be the remains of tubercular dis- ease ; most frequently the summits of both lungs were affected. M. Prus likewise found, on examining the bodies of old people, in a large proportion of them traces of former tuberculization of the lungs; in some cases the tubercles had disappeared, leaving cavities lined with a membrane of new formation, and communicating with the bronchia; in other cases there were fibrous or cartilaginous cicatrices; in others, again, the tubercles sometimes encysted, at other times not, were infiltrated with a large amount of chalky, calcareous, or ossiform substance.1 More general observation has verified of late years the frequency of these cases; and if recoveries from pulmonary phthisis have not been so numerous as they might have been, it is because the right means of effecting cures have rarely been adopted. In Great Britain more especially, as also in the United States, practitioners, unlike those of most European countries, are accustomed to trust almost exclusively to pharmaceutical agents in the treatment of chronic diseases, but seldom endeavouring to rectify the anormal conditions of the system, upon which depend morbid local manifestations, by the em- ployment of hygienic and medical means, which, by effecting favourable modifications in the constitution of patients, tend to procure permanent cures instead of a temporary alleviation of suffering or a transient amelioration of their state. To occupy one's self in treating merely the manifestations of a diathesis, says a distinguished French physician, is, generally, as if one were to run after the shadow, and leave the substance which it is desirable to obtain.3 And the adoption of this mode of treatment in a disease which 1 Compendium de Me'decine Pratique, art. Phthisis. * 31. Biiume's, Traits des Diatheses. Paris, 1853.