The pulse / by W.H. Broadbent ; illustrated with 59 ophygmographic tracings.

  • William Broadbent
Date:
[1899?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The pulse / by W.H. Broadbent ; illustrated with 59 ophygmographic tracings. 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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    and feeble. The ])atient sank ra]3idly, and died in December from asthenia. In another case the evidence of granular kidney was not so decided, but the patient suffered from gout, and after a time had albuminuria. He always had a large, short_, soft pulse, the arteries being free from any evidence of thickening or degeneration, and never full between the beats; the low tension was due to absence of resistance in the capillaries, and not to any weakness of the heart. This patient drank a good deal of whisky, which may have influenced the tension, and contributed to the final result, which was rapid succession of violent, one-sided convulsions, which came on suddenly, and persisted to a fatal ter- mination. An imperfect development of arterio-capillary resistance and arterial tension is much more common in acute tubular nephritis. It is met with at all ages, but with greater relative frequency in patients of middle age. One of the most striking examples came under observation many years since. The patient was a man of forty-five or thereabouts, stout, fresh- coloured, and healthy-looking, perfectly temperate in his habits, and not very sedentary in his mode of life : he was a foreman at a large place of business. He was admitted into St. Mary's Hospital on account of acute albuminuria, attributed to a chill. At first sight it seemed that the patient had vigour sufficient to en- able him to throw off* any form of acute illness, but the pulse was found to be singularly deficient in ten- sion, not because of any weakness of the heart, but from absence of resistance in the capillaries. Dropsy Avas developed rapidly, and the patient died after a long, lingering illness. In younger patients there is usually recovery from the acute attack, but large white kidney remains. Brief notes may be given of a ca§e recently under