Copy 1, Volume 1

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

  • John Mason Good
Date:
1829
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

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

    735/752 (page 665)
    arises from a plethoric state of the blood-vessels, more Gey. VI. especially from a disproportionate accumulation of blood sierneleia in the heart and large vessels;” an opinion more in ac- ambulan- cordance with the observation of Dr. John Forbes, than any “™ of the others*. Dr. Darwin mentions it as a sort of asthma, producing a cramp of a peculiar kind in the dia- phragm, or the other muscles of respiration; while a very large number of pathologists, among whom may be men- tioned Elsner}, Benger{, Dr. Butter§, and Dr. Mac- queen||, have endeavoured to account for it as a particular species of gout: and hence Dr. Berger attacked it with gum guaiacum, which, in his paper upon this subject in the Copenhagen Transactions, he asserts to have been particularly serviceable. Dr. Latham has, in various in- stances, found it in persons who, possessed of sound. chests and apparently untainted constitutions {, were affected with enlargements of the abdominal viscera, or other dis- eases seated in these organs. That there is a violent and painful constriction of some Many of of the muscles about the sternum during the existence of re “ere the paroxysm, and that respiration is hence greatly im- preliepoe- peded, is unquestionable; and that many of the above mis- en pi formations of structure, or constitutional habits, may oc- of them casion a predisposition to sternalgia, is highly probable; ¢ paid he eft but they give us little or no information concerning the © cause that immediately produces it ; while it is by no means unlikely, that several of these morbid changes, thus brought forward as causes, are themselves only effects of so labori- ous and perilous a struggle. And hence we cannot, I am Hence not afraid, in our present defective knowledge of the physio- pair logy of the disease, do more than adopt the modest opinion on struc- of Dr. Bergius and Dr. Heberden, and regard it as de- rsa < gement, pendent upon a cause that has not yet been traced out, but which does not seem to originate necessarily in any ‘structural derangement of the organs affected. * See note in transl. of Laennec on Diseases of the Chest, 2d edit. p. 692. + Abhandlung weber die Brustbrdnne. Kénigsburg. + See Algem. Deutsche, Bibl. xxxvi. 125. § Treatise on the disease commonly called Angina Pectoris, Lond. 1791. || Lond. Med. Journ. vol. v. 4] Medical Transactions, vol. iv. art. xvi.