An inquiry into the proximate cause of gout and its rational treatment / by Anthony White.

  • White, Anthony, 1782-1849.
Date:
1848
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An inquiry into the proximate cause of gout and its rational treatment / by Anthony White. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    died at the respective ages of 45 and 46, worn out by reiterated attacks of the malady. For myself, sharing largely in the family predisposition, I very early in life began to exhibit signs of latent gout, shown in the ready conversion of common nutriment into acrid acidity; and among my earliest recollections are my mother’s repeated administrations to me of magnesia and alkaline preparations, to remedy the heartburn with which I was constantly tormented. About the age of sixteen, a fixed aching pain occupied the middle flexor tendon of my right hand near the root of the finger, preventing its flexure. In the course of a week or two the pain in the finger ceased suddenly, and was almost instantly succeeded by a severe attack of gout in the large joint of the great toe, ushered in by all the usual precursory symptoms. The subsequent visitations of the disease have extended over a period of forty years, during which it has successively affected every tissue of my body. Hence, I have had abundant opportunity not only to experiment upon the gout in my own person as regards dietetics and therapeutics, but also to study its natural history under the least ambiguous conditions, whenever, as not unfrequently happened, I allowed a paroxysm to run its course, and effect its own cure. It was chiefly by noticing what took place under such circumstances that I was led to entertain those views which I shall presently lay before my reader. But first, for the sake of clearness, it will be well to define the actual state of our knowledge as to the inti- mate nature of gout; and this I think cannot be better expressed than in the following propositions, wherein