A treatise on venereal diseases / by A. Vidal (de Cassis) ; translated, with annotations, by George C. Blackman.
- Auguste Vidal de Cassis
- Date:
- 1874
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: A treatise on venereal diseases / by A. Vidal (de Cassis) ; translated, with annotations, by George C. Blackman. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.
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![snrgeons of the Lock Hospital, London, has publislied a paper, showing that long-continued pain in bone may depend, among other causes, upon the deposition of solid material, arising from the poison of syphilis. In the treatment of this affection, he re- commends the operation of trephining. This idea was suggested to him by a case which occurred at the Lock Hospital during his connection with it as house-surgeon. A young and delicate woman died after severe and protracted suffering from pain in the right thio-h. On examining the bone, its cancellated structure was found occupied at different parts, by a morbid deposit of a light- brown color, of a moderately firm consistence, and which was dis- tributed in irregular patches. The parietes of the bone were greatly thickened, and a kind of cancellous structure had been developed between the original outline of the bone and the newly- formed portion. On the 29th of May, 1849, he operated on a woman, in whom the pain and swelling were confined to the im- mediate neighborhood of the knee-joint. As the epiphysis of the bone appeared to be the original seat of the disease, he trephined at this part. As soon as the outer shell of bone was peiforated, the cancellous structure was felt to give Avay under the press- ure of the instrument, and some minute and separate flakes of white matter were observed to escape with the blood by its side. On the 24th August, her health was quite restored; she could raise her leg without any pain or inconvenience, and had expe- rienced no return of the ' old pain' since leaving the hospital. On the 19th October, 1852, Mr. Langston Parker read a paper before the Medico-Chirurgical Society of Birmingham, On the Nature and Treatment of some painful Affections of BoneJ'' In this, he states that the medullary membrane is liable to become in- flamed in the tertiary stages of syphilis, and owing to the un- yielding nature of the walls by which it is surrounded, this in- flammation produces at times the most atrocious pains. In a case of this kind, he perforated the medullary cavity with a trephine, and the hole thus made was kept open by a tent of lint changed every morning. The relief to pain was complete ; whilst previous to this operation, it had resisted all the usual remedies in such cases, blisters, opiates, iodide of potass, &c., and had at times been so excessive that she had frequently importuned me to amputate the limb. In gratefully acknowledging our obligations to the author for a copy of this interesting essay, we would observe that he recommends the trephine in cases of inflammation of the medul- lary membrane arising from scrofula, rheumatism, and wounds.— G. C. B.] It is difficult to give a perfect idea of the character of these osteocopes. Sometimes, at the commencement, they seem to be wandering, the whole skeleton being painful. Th^ are then often profound, that is, they come, in the language of the patient, from the marrow of the bones. In the majority of cases, they are fixed, yet not very clearly seated at any particular point of the skeleton. They are then acute, and lacerating; the patient feels as though the ])one were strongly pressed in a very narrow space,](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21082340_0439.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
