Practical manual of diseases of women and uterine therapeutics : for students and practitioners / by H. Macnaughton Jones.

  • Macnaughton-Jones, Henry, 1844-1918.
Date:
1885
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Practical manual of diseases of women and uterine therapeutics : for students and practitioners / by H. Macnaughton Jones. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    causing spasmodic closure of the urethra, and producing obstruction. It is periodical, and is relieved by diet and hygienic measures. But even if there be no considerable obstruction, and simply an abnormal condition of the tissues and nerves of a sensitive part, acute reflected pain may occur elsewhere. Witness severe urethral pain with haemorrhoids and remote pains in the extremities from stricture of the urethra. In asthma, instanced by Dr. Duncan, the pain or distress is distinctly caused by the impeded blood current, and we have to look altogether beyond the phenomenon of spasm for the proximate cause of the obstruction. It is true that certain uterine contrac- tions are painful, but all are not so, as, for example, the contractions of the uterus which occur throughout pregnancy, and which the woman is unconscious of. These are purely physiological contractions; they are not the pathological ones of the patient suffering from dysmenorrhoea, or, for the matter of that, the after-pains of labour, in which we often have ob- struction, and where there is a foreign body to be expelled. But are they morbid 1 Are those of labour morbid 1] In those very exceptional cases in which we can on examination find no abnormal state to explain the dys- menorrhoea, we may feel certain that it is for the simple reason that we have not been able to discover it. The subtle relationship of ovary and uterus is sufficient to account for sympathies and reflex acts that we can find no physical explanation of. Even Dr. Duncan will allow that it is the exception to meet any severe case of spasmodic dysmenorrhoea without some attendant abnormal state of the uterus or ovary to explain it. Malformed cervix, con- tracted cervical canal, congenitally small uterus, and one in which a healthful act of ovulation fails to find its external physiological expression in the proper menstrual flow; the glairy plug of endometritis; the uterus flexed, hyperplastic 29
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