Eczema, its nature and treatment : and incidentally, the influence of constitutional conditions on skin diseases being the Lettsomian lectures for the session 1869-70 delivered before the Medical Society of London / by Tilbury Fox.
- William Tilbury Fox
- Date:
- 1870
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Eczema, its nature and treatment : and incidentally, the influence of constitutional conditions on skin diseases being the Lettsomian lectures for the session 1869-70 delivered before the Medical Society of London / by Tilbury Fox. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![work published in 1798: They [modern authors] make artificial arrangements by no means consistent with each other; some reducing all the diseases under one or two genera; whilst others, too studious of amplification, apply new names to different stages of the same complaint. .... There seems to be a peculiar impropriety in classing the diseases, as some have done, from hypothetical principles rather than from their obvious characteristic appearance. But it was necessary that Hebra's definition of eczema should not imply the absolute necessity of discharge or vesiculation, because his eczema must include such things as the so-called papulous eczema and eczema marginatum. The last has now been shown to be a parasitic disease ; hence we omit from the current eczema of the day one item which seemed to bear testimony to the fact that eczema may be a dry disease. Again, one of the two conditions making up the so-called papulation of eczema, and a consideration of which appeared to show the same thing, is not eczema at all. I refer to the papules formed by congested and erected follicles—those which are referred to by both Hebra and Wilson as being seen especially around the circumference of patches of eczema. Mr. Wilson distinctly calls this E. papulatum* The condition is altogether accidental; it is not peculiar to eczema, but is common under any circumstances in which the skin is con- gested and irritated. The true papule of eczema is that one which—and Hebra refers to these particular papules and describes them correctly—becomes a vesicle. It is not a congested follicle. Hebra says—in comparing the early stage of lichen ruber, for instance, with the papular stage of eczema,t— This eruption, eczema, is attended with the formation of papules the size of millet-seeds or hemp-seeds, of a pale or dark red colour, presenting no scales, but con- taining a transparent fluid, which escapes on pressure being applied to them; they are frequently accompanied by vesicles. In other words, the true papulation of * Loc. cit., p. 132. f Loc. cit., p. 63.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b20422131_0024.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
