On tabes dorsalis : the Lumleian lectures delivered before the Royal College of Physicians, London, March, 1906.

  • Ferrier, David, 1843-1928.
Date:
1906
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: On tabes dorsalis : the Lumleian lectures delivered before the Royal College of Physicians, London, March, 1906. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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

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    the evolution of our knowledge of tabes, its nature and causes, and to indicate the problems as yet unsolved and on which we need further light. Tabes dorsalis, in the modern acceptation of the term (and in reference to this I would remark at the outset that but for their consecration by custom, I should like to discard the term dorsalis altogether, and the still more barbarous adjective tabetic, in favour of tabes and tabid) is a very different thing from the tabes dorsalis or dorsualis—wrcd?— of the Hippocratic writers. This was essentially a condition of neurasthenia associated with sperma- torrhoea, and attributed to sexual vice or excess. It was supposed to be due to wasting of the spinal cord, but on what evidence this was based there is nothing to show. That true tabes ever existed in Europe before the introduction of syphilis in the fifteenth century is more than doubtful. The reten- tion of the name tabes dorsalis (or dorsualis) by the older German writers for the disease as we now understand it, though strictly correct according to modern pathology, tended largely to create con- fusion and excite prejudice against its unfortunate victims. Though cases of what we now know must have been tabes had been described by various ob- servers, such as Ollivier (1824), Hutin (1827), and Cruveilhier (1835-42), (who figures the post-mortem appearances in his atlas), in France; and by Horn (1827), Jacoby (1842), Steinthal (1844), &c., *n Germany; and though in this country Todd (1847) had drawn a clear distinction between paralysis and