Lectures on the malarial fevers / by William Sydney Thayer.

  • Thayer, William Sydney, 1864-1932.
Date:
1901
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Lectures on the malarial fevers / by William Sydney Thayer. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

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    of the organ and an increase in the amount of connective tis- sue—a chronic hepatitis—do unquestionably follow repeated malarial infections ; this condition has been well described by Bignami. There are, however, no distinctive clinical symp- toms. This subject will be further discussed in the lecture on pathological anatomy. Malarial Paralyses.—That various transitory paralyses may occur during pernicious paroxysms has been stated in a previous lecture. The paralyses occurring during acute malarial infections are usually cortical in nature and clear up rapidly under treatment with quinine. They are due prob- ably, for the most part, to circulatory disturbances induced mechanically by the parasites. The nervous symptoms in acute malaria are more commonly irritative than paralytic. It is readily conceivable that under certain circumstances a malaria] paroxysm might be the exciting cause of the rup- ture of a cerebral vessel or the dislodgment of a fragment of a thrombus in an individual with cardiac or arterial disease. Such an instance has come under my observation. The patient, a colored man fifty-three years of age, with some- what thickened arteries, became suddenly unconscious during a paroxysm of tertian fever, developing a right-sided hemi- plegia with aphasia. He was brought into the hospital un- conscious, and the malarial infection was not suspected until the following paroxysm. The infection yielded immediately to quinine, but the hemiplegia, though showing a marked im- provement, had not wholly cleared up at the time of the dis- charge of the patient. In this instance the malarial fever was probably only the remote cause of the hemiplegia. A certain number of cases has been reported where, in association with a malarial infection, symptoms have occurred which were suggestive of disseminated sclerosis ; with the