The water cure in chronic disease : an exposition of the causes, progress and terminations of various chronic diseases of the digestive organs, lungs, nerves, limbs and skin : and of their treatment by water, and other hygienic means / by James Manby Gully.
- James Manby Gully
- Date:
- 1856
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: The water cure in chronic disease : an exposition of the causes, progress and terminations of various chronic diseases of the digestive organs, lungs, nerves, limbs and skin : and of their treatment by water, and other hygienic means / by James Manby Gully. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.
26/478 (page 8)
![part, consequent on tlie retention of the Ijlood in the ex- hausted and relaxed vessels, the vital chemistry being, for the time, imjiroperly carried on. These pliases apply to all acutely diseased parts -srhat- ever—from the small pimple ou the skin to the most intense inflammation of the lungs or l>raiu. In all, the same sta<;es occur, whatever the exciting cause may be; ■whether it be the atom of dirt irritating the follicle of the sliin, and producing the pimple there, or the rusli of cold air into the lungs, irritating their mucous membrane, and drawing excessive blood into it. From what precedes, it appears that the intimate vital condition of a part in acute disease is one of debility. The blood-vessels have lost their contractile energy, and are oppressed with blood, which they lack the power to throw- off. But we must not, meanwhile, lose sight of the fact, that the organic nerves themselves, whose re-action on excessive stimulus has produced all this mischief, are also supplied with and nourished by blood-vessels : and that therefore they, too, are in a state implying diseased sensa- tion and nutrition. In other words, they are exquisitely irritable, but their irritability is of a diseased quality, and not sustained, because they are badly nourished by the blood; the result of which is more than ordinary sensi- tiveness to the causes which first induced the disease, or to any stijnulus whatever applied to the part. Feeble con- traction takes place, then more exhaustion ; contraction again, and so on until all power is lost. Thus a man gets a slight inflammation of the mucous lining of the wind- ])ipe from breathing very cold air: allows the same cause to exasperate it daily by acting on the highly irritable but feeble nerves and blood-vessels of the membrane; and, finally, induces the most intense form of inflammation of the lungs—a too frequent illustration of the fact, that the most fatal maladies cotumence in a slight cold. Ilaving thus established the fact, that acute disease of an organ implies extreme debility, morbid irritability, and congest ion of its blood-vessels and orgnnie nerves, we may now revert to the proposition, that nil so-called general disease originates in some local disorder—])roposition that will lu'st be developed by tracing the ])liysical history of such a local condition as I have above described. And we will take the local inflammation of an organ whoso sympathies are the most extensive -acute mucous in-](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21450778_0026.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
