Selected essays and monographs : translations and reprints from various sources.

Date:: 1897

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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Selected essays and monographs : translations and reprints from various sources. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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stomach. Independent of food or of the time of the day, he then begins to feel pain in the abdomen, and has severe Gripes, as he calls them; sharp recurring attacks of colicky pains in the central portion of the abdomen. Formerly the pain w as severe enough to double him up, but of late years it has not been so intense, and he gets more relief by straightening himself out to the full extent. He often vomits, and in the early attacks always did so. Of late years he has had more belching, which seems to relieve the ]^ain. In some attacks he has had diarrhoea, but of late he has been constipated during and after them. With the abdominal symptoms, sometimes preceding them, there is Fever. He gets burning hot everywhere but in his feet. Within a few hours he becomes delirious ; as his wife expresses it, he talks “ out of his head.” He himself says that he talks much nonsense, just as in a fever, and imagines all sorts of things.. One of Ins favourite fancies is that in an attack, during the colic, he has twenty-six throats and twenty-six stomachs, which are all m a row, and he cannot pick out the one which belongs to him, and which is causing the pain. I had obtained this much of the history from him, and was beginning to be very interested, as it seemed an unusual sort of affection, when he voluntarily expressed the information that in the attacks “ great big liver spots came out all over him ” In several of the first attacks he thought he had been poisoned by eating something that had disagreed with him. The spots came out on the trunk and arms, not so often on the legs, and they were sometimes so large that they took days to disappear, borne have been as large as the palm of his hand. They are always red, sometimes raised, but never itch. During the first e ears almost every attack was characterized by them For nearly two years he has not had any of the blotches on the skin Aft Ti, ?ti°n °f th6 attack is from six *0 ton hours After them lie feels very sore in the abdomen, particularly the light side. He is irritable and has lack of energy He has never had pain or swelling in the joints. The urine is sometimes W ’ mOTe’ lle thinks’ than is common in bee^Tbifti0 Si“ilar di801'd® “ llis. family- He has always a ly, s long man, and is actively engaged in business.