The tongue as an indication in disease : being the Lumleian lectures delivered at the Royal College of Physicians in March 1888 / by W. Howship Dickinson.

  • William Howship Dickinson
Date:
1888
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The tongue as an indication in disease : being the Lumleian lectures delivered at the Royal College of Physicians in March 1888 / by W. Howship Dickinson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    enumerated among the signs of malignity in acute diseases. Phrensy, he tells us elsewhere, may be foretold by blackness of the tongue. Boerhaave re- fers, as his topics suggest, and with more soundness of observation than I have found in any preceding writer, to the relation of the salivary secretion to disease and to dryness of the tongue. ‘ The saliva,’ he says, ‘continually flows into the mouth of a person in health, and nothing is a surer sign to a physician of disease in a patient than his having a dry mouth.’ Elsewhere he tells us that an inflammatory obstruction is indicated, and phlebotomy called for, by suppression of the sweat and spittle. But the mouth he says is made dry also by exposure to air, as in sleeping with the mouth open, and when the nose is stopped up. Mason Good in his ‘ Study of Medicine’ presents, with much learning and amplitude, the state of medical knowledge in the year 1822. He describes the tongue of scarlatina as red with elongated papillae, and in the more severe forms as covered with a black chappy crust. In typhus the tongue is first whitish, then dry, livid and black, while the teeth are covered with black tenacious sordes. With yellow fever the tongue is at first white tinged with yellow, then black. Thrush is described as belonging to hectic: the aphthe in dysenteric fever in particular foreshowing imminent death. With regard to the relation of thirst to dryness of the tongue, which
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