Rheumatism: its nature, causes, and cure : gout: its nature, causes, cure, and prevention / by James Alexander.

  • James Alexander
Date:
1858
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Rheumatism: its nature, causes, and cure : gout: its nature, causes, cure, and prevention / by James Alexander. 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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    fortable glow. When the application of cold is more intense or more prolonged, it acts as a direct sedative; but cold air, if dry, although much more intense in degree, does not appear so favourable to the induction of rheumatism as a very much higher temperature when combined with moisture. The reason is, that water is a much better and more rapid conductor of heat than air; a given amount of cold will therefore, when combined with moisture, abstract more heat, and reduce the vitality of a part more rapidly than a much greater degree of cold un- combined with moisture. We find that the army medical statistics confirm these views, and that rheumatism is in Canada, where the air is very cold but very dry, a disease of much less fre- quent occurrence than at the Cape of Good Hope, where the geranium and myrtle are out- door plants. It will naturally be asked, if cold and moisture are the exciting causes of the dis- ease, how is it that of a number of persons exposed to the same exciting cause, only a frac- -tional portion shall suffer from rheumatism? Tlie answer is, simply because the predisposition exists in only a limited number; that ])redispo- sition is dependent on the existence in the cir- culation at the time of the application of the exciting cause of a larger quantity than common
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