A practical treatise on the diseases of the throat and lungs with their treatment by inhalation / by Robert Hunter.

  • Hunter, Robert, 1826-
Date:
1854
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A practical treatise on the diseases of the throat and lungs with their treatment by inhalation / by Robert Hunter. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    is obstructed by disease, the appetite fails, and the body wastes away. When the air breathed is impure, the same thing takes place; the face becomes thin and pale, the features sharp, the respiration hurried, and the appetite poor. Persons so afflicted, all die of consumption. No constitution is proof against this influence. The strong man, who has inherited a full development of the chest, may possibly bear up under it for a longer time than the feeble scion of a consumptive family; but he, too, will fall in the end, from the same disease, charac- terized by the same stages and symptoms, and arising from the same cause. To those hereditarily predisposed I would say: Do not despair because your parents, or brothers, or sisters, or other kindred, on either side, have fallen a prey to Con- sumption. If your frame is delicate, and your chest small, seek the open air and regular exercise. Observe what nature requires; be faithful to her demands, and you may live to bury half the strong men of your acquaintance. That impure air is the great cause of Consumption is further proved by the fact, that this disease occurs also in the brute creation, when placed under the same circumstances as the human. I believe, says Sir James Clark, that Consumption may be induced in any class of animals, by those circumstances which produce it in man. Mr. Owens, the assistant curator of the Museum of the Royal College of Physicians, London, found tubercles and cavities in the lungs of most of the animals that died in the gardens of the Zoological Society. The morbid appearances presented on examination, were precisely simi- lar to those occurring in man. Regnaud, of Paris, examined the lungs of monkeys, and found tubercles in every stage— cavities, and in several, even ulceration of the larynx and epi- glottis. Cows, when confined within the walls of a dairy, and caged animals, all die of Consumption. If, then, this so called hereditary malady occurs in animals without inherited predisposition, when placed under certain injurious influences, such influences must be regarded as the cause of the disease. Animals neither in their proper state of nature, nor after being domesticated, when allowed to roam at large, ever have consumption! It cannot, therefore, have