On the relation between diabetes and food and its application to the treatment of the disease / by Arthur Scott Donkin.

Date:
1875
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the relation between diabetes and food and its application to the treatment of the disease / by Arthur Scott Donkin. 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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    ATROPHY OF THE HEART. racter, by which life is often cut short before the disease has run its full course. It is not within the scope of this work to describe these affections in detail, but I may mention that the most im- portant of them are cataract, carbuncle and car- buncular boils, erysipelatous inflammation, gan- grene, bronchitis, pneumonia, and tubercular phthisis (of a form supposed by some to be pe- culiar to diabetes). There is one secondary condition of very serious import which gradually creeps on amidst the general ruin and wasting which prevail, namely, atrophy of the heart, which is certainly deserving, in a practical point of view, of much more special attention than it has yet received from pathologists. The subject, however, has not escaped the attention of Sir James Paget.^ He refers to the case of a woman, aged 22, who died of diabetes, and whose heart, of which there is a drawing in the museum of St. Bartholomew's Hospital, weighed only five ounces. In this case. Sir James considers the atro]3hied heart to have been sufBlcient for the impoverished ' Lectures on Surgical Pathology, 3rcl ed., pp. 86 and 94.