Muscular atrophy and sclerodermia / by J.A. Nixon.

  • Nixon, John Alexander, 1874-1951.
Date:
1903
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Muscular atrophy and sclerodermia / by J.A. Nixon. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    ingrowth of connective or fibrous tissue, which, spreading inwards from the skin, bound into bundles the muscle-fibres, interfered with their movement and nourishment, and finally determined their wasting. Of recent years, however, cases have been recorded, at first isolated, but now somewhat more frequently, in which the changes in the muscles, far from following after the altered state of the skin, precede it, and, indeed, progress without the neighbouring skin being at any time affected. Stelwagon, in his treatise on diseases of the skin, sums up the observations of other workers in the same field, and shows a large variety of lesions which have been seen with sclerodermia. Thibierge has found it co-existing with arthritic changes, in which the joints may present the appearance of rheumatoid arthritis, even with ankylosis, a veritable “sclerodactylia”; and similar cases have been reported by Osier, Dercum, Elliott, Uhlenhuth, and others. Alopecia and leucodermia have been described with sclero- dermia, while local trophic disturbances—pain, heat or burning, sense of numbness, diminished sweat, in the affected area—are of frequent occurrence. With such diverse manifestations, the aetiology of the disease can well be expected to be uncertain and possibly not always constant; yet the cases hitherto collected in which sclerodermia and muscular atrophy are related present so many points of similarity, both in the distribution and course of the affection, that the impression that some single cause governs these changes is wellnigh unavoidable. The temptation of making all diseases conform to a type is a sufficiently strong one, and possibly many of the greatest errors in medicine have been made owing to this tendency on the part of scientific observers; one likes to pigeon-hole a disease, to minimise the points of contrast between one patient and another, and to bring out into high relief the similarities, so that the final triumph may be achieved of labelling a new disease with a new name, and suggesting a new (and probably “synthetic”) preparation as the new remedy. But this is