Caries of the spine : being an advance chapter of The spine its deformities, debilities, and deficiencies (third edition now in press) / by Heather Bigg.

  • Bigg, Henry Robert Heather, 1853-1911.
Date:
1902
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Caries of the spine : being an advance chapter of The spine its deformities, debilities, and deficiencies (third edition now in press) / by Heather Bigg. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by UCL Library Services. The original may be consulted at UCL (University College London)

    19/88 (page 17)
    other in the step. The further .stages, I have aever had the misfortune to meet with in my own practice, but they may be briefly recorded as follows : continuous pain in the limbs, loss of control over the bladder and rectum, formation of bed-sores, inflammation of the bladder, blood poisoning, and death—in short, the well-known sequences of fatal paralysis. The consideration of the varying muscular areas affected, according to the spot of attack in the cord, as well as the responses of the muscular reflexes and reactions, I purposely omit, as unneeded in a work of this kind. Mortality.—From what has previously been written, the presumptive chances of a fatal termination are obvious. In suppurative caries an extending abscess may press on some vital part, as suffocative retro-pharyngeal ones will sometimes do y or it may burst into the vessels and produce fatal hemor- rhage; or it may break into the vital cavities and cause pleurisy, pneumonia, or peritonitis; or it may burst on the surface of the body and becoming septic initiate blood- poisoning; or its constitutional drain may produce fatal exhaustion. On the other hand, in cheesy caries, the injury to the cord and its membranes may entail fatal paralysis, or cause meningitis. Yet notwithstanding this long list of threatened risks, death from caries should now be very rare, as both the suppurative and the cheesy expansion can be stopped if cases are caught early and rightly dealt with by modern methods. That this has only recently been possible is shown by the older statistics. Mr. William Adams, whose considerable practice extended over half-a-century, gives his fatal figures at 5 per cent, with children, and 20 per cent, with adults, hut liis records were made before asepticism had asserted its hold, and further, they may have included his hospital cases at a time when the children of the poor were treated as chronic out-patients, and could not obtain at home the proper sustenance to enable them to cope will, the disease, In the present day institutions are increasing in winch such children can have the nutritive advantages of in-patients' treatment, and that too in localities where free air and sun- afforcl fckem materia] constitutional aid. All things con- sidered, the mortality from caries should have recently much