Copy 1, Volume 2

The study of medicine. Containing all the author's ... improvements / [John Mason Good].

  • John Mason Good
Date:
1829
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The study of medicine. Containing all the author's ... improvements / [John Mason Good]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    658/724 (page 648)
    648 CL. III] HEMATICA, [orD. I. Gen. XII. obvious or unobvious cause, antecedent affection or health eee: of the digestive function, than from the actual symptoms themselves. Stoll maintains that they are only varieties * of the same disease: Bergius, that they are convertible White. affections. White-swelling, in one of its varieties, is now “capi uniformly regarded as a sequel of rheumatism, or the result nected with Of a rheumatic diathesis; while the other varieties cannot the above. be separated from the species. Whether From the close connexion between, gout and rheumatism, gout and Sauvages, and various other nosologists, distinguish some rheumatism Ses, e Geter S everco- of the cases of disguised gout by the name of rheumatic ss gout. Mr. Hunter warmly opposed this compound appel- lation; for his doctrine was, that no two distinct diseases, or even diseased diatheses, can co-exist in the same con- stitution. And, as a common law of nature, the observa- tion is, I believe, strictly correct; one of the most frequent examples of which is the suspension of phthisis during the irritation of pregnancy. But it is a law subject to many exceptions; for we shall have occasion, as we pro- ceed, to notice the co-existence of measles and small-pox; and I had, not long since, under my care, a lady in her forty-ninth year, of delicate health and gouty diathesis, who was labouring under a severe and decisive fit of gout in the foot, which was prodigiously tumefied and inflamed, and had been so for several days, brought on by a violent attack of lumbago+, to which she was then a victim, and which rendered her nights more especially sleepless and highly painful. The constitutional disease had in this case been roused into action by the superadded irritation of the accidental disease; and the two were running their course conjointly. Itis also astriking fact, that one of the severest illnesses that attacked Mr. Hunter’s own per- son, and which ultimately proved to be disguised gout, podagra larvata, he suspected, in its onset, to be a rheu- matic ailment. The case, as given by Sir Everard Home, in his Life of Mr. Hunter, is highly interesting and * Rat. Med. Part 111. p. 122—137. v. p. 420. + Lumbago is socommon in gouty subjects, that the editor is inclined 4 to be- lieve it is as frequently met with in them as in rheumatic patients. He cannot, therefore, regard the above case, as decidedly proving the co-existence of gout and rheumatism in the same individual.