The water-cure in chronic diseases : an exposition of the causes, progress, and terminations of various chronic diseases of the digestive organs, lungs, nerves, limbs, and skin, and of their treatment by water, and other hygenic means / by James Manby Gully.

  • Gully, James Manby, 1808-1883.
Date:
1854
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The water-cure in chronic diseases : an exposition of the causes, progress, and terminations of various chronic diseases of the digestive organs, lungs, nerves, limbs, and skin, and of their treatment by water, and other hygenic means / by James Manby Gully. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    35/480 (page 17)
    I have exemplified from this hxst-named chronic dis- order, because it is the most familiar ; but the same doctrine applies to all other organs of the body. In chronic disease of the au--tubes of the lungs, for instance, which includes what are called old man's cough and himiid asthma, the same relaxation of blood-ves.sels and loss of accord between them and their contents, beget morbid expectoration on the one hand, and excessive sensitiveness to the quality and quantity of the air that enters them in respiration on the other. Tliere is frequently, too, the same caprice as regards air, which we have noticed in the stomach as regards food (for air is the food of the lungs) ; and asthmatic patients will sometimes be able to breathe only the heavy and smoky atmosphere of towns ; at others, only the elastic and light breezes of moimtains. Or, suppose chronic disease fixed deeper in the lungs, in their spongy texture ; there, too, the same condition of blood-vessels and their contents gives rise to analogous results ; and the morbid nutrition going ou in the part leads to the formation of abscesses, of tubercles, sooner or later to terminate in pulmonary consumption, of cancerous deposit of calcareous matter, &c.—all of them dependent on morbid influence of the ganglionic nerves of the part, morbid blood-vessels, and morbid blood. From_ these in.stances all tlie rest may be conceived. In the brain, in the heart, in the liver and kidneys, in the bones and their covering, in the sheaths and great cover- ings of the muscles, in the ligaments of the joints, and, finally, in the .skin, the same state forms the chronic dis- order of each ami all. Excessive and morbid secretion, nutrition, and .sen.sation, the result of exhausted vitality of the Idood-vessels, diseased blood within them, and extreme but fii.sfa,sed .sensitiveness of the ganglionic nerves of the T'art, constitute the organic facts in these difierent textures and organs of the body. I now firocced to review the. maimer in which a com- bination of points of chronic di.sorder is brought aliout, and a di.sea.se, from being simph;, Ijcconics comiilicated.