A manual of diet in health and disease / by Thomas King Chambers.

  • Chambers, Thomas King, 1818-1889.
Date:
1875
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A manual of diet in health and disease / by Thomas King Chambers. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    disease lies not in the injury it directly inflicts, as in the likeli- hood of the induction of other lesions of the heart. If the muscnlar structure remains healthy, injured valves do not appear capable of causing death. But very surely are they fatal when they are followed by dilatation or thickening or degeneration of the cai-diac walls, with the sad train of dropsies, apoplexy, pulmonary hgemorrhage, &c. In 2161 post-mortem examinations at St. George's Hospital in ten years, the cardiac valves were diseased without the walls of the heart being affected 113 times ; but in every case there were other lesions amply sufScient to account for death quite independent of the valves, such as accidents, surgical complaints, cancer, low fever, &c. In one alone, where ana- sarca from granular kidneys was the immediate cause of death, could any symptom be debited to diseased valves with healthy heart, and that symptom was pulmonary hoBmor- rhage.^ In the classes of people represented by hospital patients, the probability that valvular disease will be followed by its un- happy consequences is very great. When a patient thus affected leaves our hospital wards, we expect to see him again shortly, and on each fresh admission with a more severe complaint. But the same expectation must not be applied to the more comfortable classes of society. Persons in easy circumstances have valvular lesions for years and years, perhaps through, the greater part of a long life, and not only continue to live, but even fail to experience symptoms bad enough to consult a medical practitioner. In my volume of Clinical Lectures ^ I gave some two dozen examples of persons found, when examined for insurance, to have valvular lesions, but who, during periods varying from 50 years downwards, had not in anywise suffered in conse- quence. This I attribute to their not being dependent for ' Decennium Paihologicum, MS. in library of Meclico-Cliirurgical Society, chap. X. sect. i. Lcct. XXV.