The water-cure in chronic disease : an exposition of the causes, progress and terminations of various chronic diseases of the digestive organs ... and of their treatment by water, and other hygienic means / by James Manby Gully.

  • Gully, James Manby, 1808-1883.
Date:
[1847?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The water-cure in chronic disease : an exposition of the causes, progress and terminations of various chronic diseases of the digestive organs ... and of their treatment by water, and other hygienic means / by James Manby Gully. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    inflammation of tlie stomach, commonly called “ acute indigestion.” A man ingests highly seasoned meats and aleoholic drinks, and begets in the mucous lining of his stomach a ])atch of such disorder I have minutely described. Now, though that disorder is, as regards the patch itself, one of depressed vital power, it becomes to other parts a source of exalted vital action; as if the very fact of the existence of a diseased point roused the system to efibrts for its relief—an opinion that was held by Hippocrates, and has ])revailed with some of the soundest physicians since his times.* The sympathy thus excited in other organs of the l)ody is in jiroportion to the amount and kind of nervous matter they contain. Thus, in the case before us, the ganglionic nervous matter of the mucous membrane of the stomach excites the same matter distributed to the heart, whose beats are, in consequence, increased in frequency and force; the pulse becomes rapid and hard; as a result of this quickened pulse, the breathings also quicken. Then comes the sympathy with the spinal cord and the brain, whose functions are rendered irregular or are oppressed; hence the lassitude of mind and limb, the prostration of strength, the somnolence first, and then the sleeplessness, &c. Then there are the sympathies with the mucous surfaces of all the other organs roused, causing the diminu- tion and mtiation of their secretions; hence the heaviness and the aching of the forehead, the suffused eyes, the fevered and dry tongue, the thirst, the stoppage of the bile, the constipation of the bowels, the scantiness of the secretion from the kidneys, all of them dependent on mucous membranes. And as this mucous surface extends to the outer part of the body, forming the true skin, the same morbid sympathy extends thither, accompanied with the same diminution and vitiation of sensation and secre- tion : hence the dry and hot skin called “ feverish heat.” In fact, here is a case of what is called “ simple inflam- matory fever,” a general disease traceable to a small point of acute inflammation in the stomach. Sometimes the * Indeed, the doctrine that disease, that is, a series of unnatural synaptoms, is constantly the signal of the whole body being excited to save some vital part from destruction, obtains countenance from all the facts that close observation of its causes, progress, and termination can supply. If space permitted, it would not be difficult to apply this doctrine to any possible case of disease.