New serum-therapy / [D. Montgomerie Paton].

  • Paton, D. Montgomerie.
Date:
1906
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: New serum-therapy / [D. Montgomerie Paton]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    days after. The diarrhoea and vomiting ceased three days before death. The child’s head was very big and the anterior fontanelle much bulged, like hydrocephalus due to meningitis. Another phase of the same lack of nutrition is seen in the debility following acute infective diseases, when the infection has gone and only the debility is left. In all cases of haemor- rhage, post operative weakness, and other similar conditions, the prompt action of the plasma is most satisfactory. This is especially marked in the very old and the very young. All of them can take and retain plasma when nothing else will keep down. Many children overcome the infection in gastro- enteritic trouble, but are unable to struggle against the exhaustion which is left behind. To such plasma is simply life. In the old the lack of recuperative power is the great difficulty in their successful treatment. In such cases plasma directly supplies them with the very materials which they are painfully struggling to elaborate for themselves. The addition of such a material makes all the difference to many of them of life or death.. The patients themselves are the first to recognise how much the plasma is doing for them. In anaemias of all kinds, either alone or in conjunction with drug treatment, plasma has proved itself capable of supplying elements the lack of which has been one of the prominent factors in the production of the disease. A very notable case treated successfully was one of splenic anaemia, which, as usual, had resisted all that could be done for it, and splenectomy alone remained as the last resource. The case is as follows : (261) Miss G., aged twenty-three, has been suffering from splenic anaemia for several years. The spleen was enormously enlarged, the lower edge being an inch below the umbilicus, while its pressure had frequently caused inflammatory attacks. She had every constitutional symptom of the disease, and almost every symptom which could arise from the enlarged spleen. She had been recommended splenectomy as a last 18
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