Diseases of modern life.

  • Benjamin Ward Richardson
Date:
1882
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Diseases of modern life. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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    interfering with transpiration, and induces more quickly tlian by any arrangement,—short of one that might be pur- posely devised for the sake of experiment,—rheumatic disease. AVhen waterproofs were first worn the number of rheumatical patients who suffered through using them was quite phenomenal. The larger and looser impermeable covering now sold, and usually adopted, has met the danger partially, but, in a limited degree, it still exists. From Errors in the Dyeing of Dress.—The intro- duction of wearing apparel, socks, stockings, and flannels which have been made, by new processes of dyeing, to assume a rich red or yellow color, has led to a local disease of the skin, attended, in rare cases, with slight constitutional symptoms. This disease is due to the dye-stuffs. The chief poisonous dyes are the red and yellow coralline, sub- stances derived from that series of chemical bodies which have been obtained of late years from coal tar, and com- monly known as the aniline series. The coloring principle is extremely active as a local poison. It induces on the skin a reddish, slightly raised eruption of minute round pimples, which stud the reddened surface, and which, if the irritation be severe and long-con- tinued, pass iutp vesicles discharging a thin watery ichor, and producing a superficial sore. The disease is readily curable if the cause of it be removed, and, as a general rule, it is purely local in character. I have, however, once seen it pass beyond the local stage. A young gentleman consulted me for what he considered was a rapidly developed attack of erysipelas on the chest and back. He was, indeed, covered with an intensely red rash, and he was affected with nervous symptoms, with faintness and depression of pulse, of a sing- ular and severe kind. I traced both the local eruption and the general malady to the effect of the organic dye in one of those red woollen chest and back comforters, which are commonly worn in cold weather. On removing the com- forter all the symptoms at once ceased. Happily the insolubility of the dye-stuff in water and in the natural secretions of the skin prevents its ready absorp- tion into the body ; for if it were easily absorbed it would actually prove fatal. Tardieu and Roussin found that coral- line, dissolved in alcohol and introduced, in doses of a few grains, into the bodies of the lower animals, destroyed life, and that the liver of an animal which had been a few days under its influence passed into a fatty degeneration. The