Vicious circles in disease / by Jamieson B. Hurry.

  • Jamieson Boyd Hurry
Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Vicious circles in disease / by Jamieson B. Hurry. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    unless skilled help is promptly given, dies miserably from self-strangulation. Fraenkel thus describes the condition : “ The sufferer gets into the clutches of a Vicious Circle. The greater the want of oxygen, the more vigorous and prolonged the muscular contractions ; the more vigorous the latter, the greater the compression of the trachea and the less room for the admission of air.” 1 Again, where tracheal stenosis is due to a goitre, the heightened blood-pressure produced during expiration raises the pressure in the extensive plexus of veins that encircle the thyroid gland. In this way increased swelling of the goitre is brought about and the stenosis is aggravated.2 Venous haemorrhage into adeno¬ matous cysts may also set up morbid correlations. The increased pressure on the trachea leads to dyspnoea, to over-filling of the right heart, and to congestion of the veins of the neck. This congestion in turn aggravates the haemorrhage. Similar complications occasionally follow when, instead of the trachea being compressed from without, there is endotracheal stenosis, due to syphilis or a new growth. The stenosis brings on dyspnoea and a remedial activity of the respiratory muscles. This 1 Lungenkrankheiten, p. 8 ; J acobson and Rowlands, Opera¬ tions of Surgery, Vol. I., p. 677. 2 Heymann, Handbuch der Laryngologie und Rhinologie, Vol. I., p. 563.