On disordered digestion and dyspepsia / by Frank Woodbury.

Date:
1889
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On disordered digestion and dyspepsia / by Frank Woodbury. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    SYMPTOMS AND FORMS OF DYSPEPSIA. From the preceding chapter the writer’s views as to the nature of dyspepsia may be inferred. By many the term has been simply considered a synonym for imperfect or difficult digestion, the name tending to perpetuate this view. Others, in seeking a patho- logical basis for the affection, regard it as the result of various local disorders by which it is usually accom- panied, such as gastric catarrh, chronic gastritis, etc. A few seem to consider the title unnecessary, and in some of the principal text books it is scarcely men- tioned. Clifford Albutt, indeed, goes so far as to de- clare it a meaningless, even an absurd term, a mere refuge for ignorance where the real pathological character of the case is not understood. It must be admitted that this criticism is not entirely undeserved, or unjust. It requires keen diagnostic insight in some cases to decide whether the very evident disorder of digestion is itself a symptom of some organic affec- tion, or really the fons et origo mali. It is very hard to tell sometimes what is going on in the pit of the stomach, but this is one of the cases where “Old experience doth attain, To something of prophetic strain ” and while cases of idiopathic dyspepsia may be numerous early in our medical career, we find them growing rarer as we learn to recognize more clearly