The history of pediatrics and its relation to other sciences and arts / by A. Jacobi. The foundation and aims of modern pediatrics / by Theodore von Escherich.

  • Abraham Jacobi
Date:
[1905]
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: The history of pediatrics and its relation to other sciences and arts / by A. Jacobi. The foundation and aims of modern pediatrics / by Theodore von Escherich. 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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    and still more, circumcision, and clitoridectomy prove more the helplessness or recklessness of the attendant than the possibility of a cure. The individual cases of recovery by the removal of clots, bones, or tumors, are great and comforting results, but if epilepsy and its rela- tions are ever to disappear, it is not the knife of the surgeon but the apparatus of human foresight and justice that will accomplish it. Most of the causes of epilepsy are preventable. To that class belong syphilis and alcoholism in various generations, rachitis, tuberculosis and scrofula, many cases of encephalo-meningitis, and most cases of otitis. A question is attributed to a royal layman, “ If preventable,why are they not prevented ? ” If there is a proof of what Socrates and Kant said, namely, that statesmanship cannot thrive without the physician, it is contained in the necessities of epilepsy. Prevention, preventives, and hygienic, medicinal, and surgical aids have to be invoked, unfortunately with slim results so far. The influence of hereditary syphilis on the diseases of the nervous system has been studied these 20 years, both by neurologists and pediatrists. Its results are either direct—that means characteristically syphilitic—or meta- syphilitic—that means merely degenerative. Hoffmann cured a case of syphilitic epilepsy in a girl of nine years in 1712. Plenk describes convulsions and other nervous symptoms depending on hereditary syphilis, and Nil Rosen de Rosenstein describes the same in 1781. The literature of the later part of the eighteenth, and of the first half of the nineteenth century is silent on that sub- ject, though the cases of affections of the nervous system depending on hereditary syphilis are very frequent (thirteen percent of all the cases, according to Rumpf die Syph. Erk. d. Nervensystems, 1889). Jullien (Arch. Gen., 1901) reports 206 pregnancies in 43 syphilitic matrimonies. Of the children, 162 remained alive. Half of them had convulsions or symptoms of meningitis. According to Nonne (die Syph. d. Nervens., 1902) hereditary syphilis differs from the acquired form in this—that several parts of the nervous system are affected simultaneously; and that arteritis, meningitis, gum- mata, and simple sclerosis occur in combination. Simple cerebral meningitis and apoplexies are very rare. Encephalitis is more frequent. Probably spinal dis- eases are more frequent, according to Gilles de la Tou- rette, Gasne, Sachs, and others. Tabes dorsalis is not frequent, but may rather depend on an atavistic syphilitic
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