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?]

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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$tlicin less able to resist tlie canses of inflammatory action than the normal textures of the body. Themselves the ])rodiict of deteriorated vital energy, they exhibit the least possible energy in opposing and casting off irritating agents, even the least so. Slowly inflammation is estab- lished in them, and surely it saps the foundations of life. No matter where the morbid deposit be—tubercles in the knee joint {ivhiie sioelling), or cancer in the nose— an exquisite sympathy with the stomach is maintained, a stomach that had long been in a state of chronic dis- order. The immediate process by which life is extinguished in such cases, is a periodical attack of fever, ending in profuse perspiration, and by the, generally, enormous discharge of fluids from the diseased points. The Avaste consequent on these two exliausting processes, leads to an increased activity of the digestNe organs to replace it. In tubercular consumption of the lungs, of the knee joint {ivhite swelling), of the bones of the Bjiine {liunbar abscess), as Avell as in ojyen cancerous ulceration, the appetite is ofttimes A^ery great, and not unfrequently extends to alcoholic stimulants. After a time, lioweA^r, the digesthm power of the stomach, unnaturally taxed as it had been, gAes signs of diminution; add to Avhich, that the excess of labour to AAdiich it has been subjected, tends to increase the inflammatory irrita- tion of the stomach which preceded, and iioav accompanies, that of the diseased tissues. The event is, that Avaste by the lungs, &c., goes on faster than supply from the digestive apparatus; blood becomes deficient in the system; the animal nervous system, the brain and spinal cord, feels this the first, liaAung the greatest need of a full supply of it, and dies from want of nutrition. In 'pulmonary con- sumption, moreoAmr, the failing nutrition of the brain and spinal cord causes failure of the nervous energy sent to the muscles AAdiich move the chest, and effect expectoration, until some large quantity of secretion rising into the air tubes, the patient is unable to disengage it thence, and suffocation takes place. Such is the end of chronic disease terminating in organic change, and it bears out the assertion that, as gluring the time the disease remains a functional one, it does so by virtue of the morbid irritation of the central nutri- tAe organ, the stomach; AAdien it has passed into the stage of organic disease, death takes place from exhaustion$