Stomatitis neurotica chronica / by A. Jacobi.

  • Abraham Jacobi
Date:
[1894]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Stomatitis neurotica chronica / by A. Jacobi. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    sometimes resulting in sleeplessness. Half of his lifetime, since his thirteenth year, he has been troubled with this eruption, which would come on with- out any apj)arent cause. He states that half of this period he has been free, not being able to explain why he should have the eruption nor why he should have been free. About ten years ago, after having been under treatment three years, he had no eruption during the course of three or four years. At that time, and in some later periods, the medicinal treatment consisted of the internal administration of atropia, arsenic, and ergot. He claims that no local treat- ment ever benefited him except the application of concentrated sulphuric acid. He says it was a notion of his own, and a.sseids that it heals the sores in a few days. Once, when the i^atient was as willing as I had been long ago, I sent him to a neurologist of well-merited fame and sound judgment. What he replied was as follows: “I could not make out the cause of the ulcers in C.’s mouth. If it is not a state due to chronic indigestion, and yielding to it, there are two possibilities to consider—one, that he is an epileptic; that the sores are due to attacks in which he bites his cheeks and lips, and of which he is wholly unconscious; secondly, that a morbid tendenc}Heads him to use various acids, etc., in his mouth (and this he admitted he did), which keep uj) the ulceration or reproduce it. He seemed to me a queer hypochondriacal person, and gave me such an indefinite history that I suspected some mental taint.” Case II.—Mrs. W., thirty-two years old, the oldest of five children in the family. Her father has a very irritable, choleric temperament; her mother is placid, a woman of character and intellect. Her oldest brother has always had a systolic heart murmur, without any h}'pertrophy, the cause of which can be referred only to an insufficient contraction of the heart muscle. He is now a man of twenty-eight. He has for the last six years had peculiar attacks (epileirtic ?), the princi2)al symptoms of which are slight contraction of the sterno-cleido-mastoid, which turns his head to the right side; scintil- lation and semi-unconsciousness, which is sometimes complicated with slight delirium, temporary forgetfulness, and limitation of his field of vision on both sides. These attacks will sometimes come on every month, sometimes not in six months. They are frequently the result of sudden turning of his head in one direction, and upward. Another brother had meningitis when three years old, with all tlie symp- toms of a tubercular meningitis. The disease did not prove fatal, but from tliat time on the boy had a feeble intellect, amounting to stui)idity; was a bad scholar at school; had an irritable, violent temper, amounting to moral insanity when quite young; became more violent when he grew up, and had finally to be confined in an asylum for the insane, where he has been these many years. A sister of the jaitient has suffered from ]>etit mal since childhood, and has feeble intellect, still she is married. A younger sister died when five years old, of convulsions during pneumonia.