Epileptic and other convulsive affections of the nervous system, their pathology and treatment.

  • Radcliffe, Charles Bland, 1822-1889.
Date:
1861
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Epileptic and other convulsive affections of the nervous system, their pathology and treatment. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by UCL Library Services. The original may be consulted at UCL (University College London)

    271/332 (page 257)
    blood in Bright's disease of the kidney, in cholera and typhoid fever, after scarlet fever, and occasionally during pregnancy, as when the emulgent veins are pressed upon by the growing uterus. The causes of retention may, indeed, vary considerably; but, however different the cause, the system is brought substantially into the same state before the convulsion happens. In a confirmed case of Bright's disease, where the history of the convulsion is perhaps defined most clearly, there are unmistakeable evidences of debility and emacia- tion, the skin is pale and puffy, and in certain parts, as about the eyelids and ankles, it pits on pressure. Appetite is wanting, ammonia is present in the breath, as may readily be seen by breathing on a glass rod which has been dipped in hydrochloric acid, a pale yellow fluid con- taining ammonia is occasionally ejected from the stomach, diarrhoea is, it may be, an urgent symptom, and the urine is scanty, loaded with albumen or casts, and wanting in a proper quantity of urea. The patient, moreover, is drowsy, stupid, listless, despondent, seeing and hearing with some difficulty, drawling in his speech, tripping in his gait, per- haps palsied in one or other of his limbs to a greater or less extent, and frequently suffering from annoying cramps. Each day these symptoms are aggravated, the drowsiness becoming more oppressive, the bodily strength more exhausted; and when this aggravation has reached a certain point, convulsion and coma make their appearance. This state of coma is peculiar in not being complete. The patient breathes stertorously, and, if let alone/appears to be dead to all within and around him, but he starts at a loud noise, or withdraws his hands if it be pinched or pricked, and for a moment the stertor ceases. Occasionally, also, he may partially wake out of this comatose condition, and delirious mutterings may show that the brain has resumed some degree of action. The stertor, moreover, is peculiar