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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    membrane of the pulmonary air tubes a chronic condition of extreme sensitiveness or morbid secretion, and some- times of both, which renders those parts exceedingly susceptible to alternations of temperature, and thus, is incessantly causing the patient to catch fresh colds, besides maintaining in the intervals a dry, hard, ringing cough, well known as stomach cough. The frequent repetition of the catarrhal attacks of the air tubes alluded to, at lengdh ends in the establishment of a chronic inflammation therein, attended with a varying, but always some amount of expectoration; and thus, what was at first only a ner- vous irritation, begetting a s}Tnpathetic cough, ends by a substantial chronic inflammatory congestion. In this congestion, induced by sympathetic extension from the stomach, we behold one of the elements that enter into that complicated malady called asthma—which I shall notice hereafter. A second degree of chronic stomach irritation, propa- gated to the lungs, tends to the formation of tubercles, and the commencement of ‘pulmonary consumption. In this instance, the phase of irritation is such as to excite a sympathetic irritation in the spongy tissue of the lungs, not in the air tubes. The minute changes constituting chronic disease, so often'spoken of in these pages, will go flir to explain the depositions of tubercular matter in such a case. But this is not all. In most persons in whom tubercular consum];)tion obtains, there is a congenial dis- l)osition of the circulating blood, which tends to such deposition in any tissue of the body as we behold in u'hite sivelling of the knee and elhoiv^ which are nothing more than inflammation of tubercles dei)osited in the bones of those joints. Now, the organic sympathies between the stomach and lungs being great, from the vast quantity of organic nervous matter they both contain, the deposition in question takes place more frequently in the lungs than elsewhere. The fact is, meantime, that the process of digestion in the stomach, which produces the constitution of the blood alluded to (a constitution com- monly known as scrojida), is rendered a morbid process ill consequence of the chronic inflammation always going on there ; for never teas there a patient labouring under tubercular deposit in the lungs imo had not previously to, and concomitantly with it, a chronic disease of the stomach. I put this dovui as an invariable fact, und am ready to