Lectures on auto-intoxication in disease, or, Self-poisoning of the individual / by Ch. Bouchard ; tr., with a preface and new chapters added, by Thomas Oliver.

  • Charles-Joseph Bouchard
Date:
1906
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Lectures on auto-intoxication in disease, or, Self-poisoning of the individual / by Ch. Bouchard ; tr., with a preface and new chapters added, by Thomas Oliver. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    maintain the same nutritive type. And among these cells the generative elements—ovule or spermatozoon—in their turn will give birth to the cells of a new being, whose nutritive activity will be similar to the individual that has begotten them. The acquired diathesis has become hereditary; it does not recognize for its cause in the descendants the vice of their own nerve re- actions. In these, nevertheless, the diathetic state really arises from nerve perturbations experienced by their ancestors. There are certain historical families whose pathological genealogy we ever know, and where the reality of the origin of these morbid states can be verified. The diathetic nutritive disorder is more than a morbid threatening; it is disease in activity. But how is this disease going to break out? It is generally after the operation of an external cause which has induced nerve changes: another exam- ple of the necessary association of several .pathogenic processes. Here is an arthritic; how will he be seized with an attack of gout? Very often after a chill, a shock,—emotional or from injury. Disease thus called forth in the course of a diathesis is an episode, a paroxysmal accident; but this accident, this epi- sode, may appear spontaneously, as the consequence of the excess of the nutritive disorder which oftenest recognizes as its deter- mining cause nerve change. Some people persist in not making this distinction, in not seeing in gout anything but the gouty accession; so much so that gout would not be a disease, but a succession of independent diseases. But what explains and links the attacks together is precisely this diathetic state, which I consider the result of a failure of nutrition. The attack of gout, on the contrary, which is the paroxysmal accident in the course of a diathesis, is characterized by an acceleration of nutrition, as I said a long time ago, and is repeated to-day, as if it were a novelty: it is the curative attempt which re-establishes the broken equilibrium. If nerve shock is capable of thus inducing an attack of gout in an arthritic it will never cause it in an individual whose nutrition is not weakened. The nutritive derangement which renders possible the pathogenic influence of nerve reactions fa- vors also parasiticism. Is it not among arthritics that you see
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