Lectures upon diseases of the rectum and the surgery of the lower bowel : delivered at the Bellevue Hospital Medical College / by W.H. Van Bruen.
- William Holme Van Buren
- Date:
- 1881
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Lectures upon diseases of the rectum and the surgery of the lower bowel : delivered at the Bellevue Hospital Medical College / by W.H. Van Bruen. Source: Wellcome Collection.
63/460 page 51
![the catamenial flow—is salutary; or, at least, that it seems a protection from more serious disease, as a sort of safety-valve to the system. I am confident that there is no truth in this idea; at all events, I have arrested the flow in a great many instances, and I have seen none but good results from the interference. The anaemic head-symptoms, such as ringing in the ears and the like, often supposed to indicate a ten- dency to apoplexy, have always promptly disap- peared, together with other alarming sensations due to impoverished blood. As a rule, bleeding piles rarely relapse after an operation which has been judiciously and thoroughly performed ; yet I have met with two cases, both females, in one of whom bleeding returned, but not the prolapse, while in the other there were both bleed- ing and protrusion to such an extent that I was com- pelled to repeat the operation. Both of these ladies were near the critical period of life, and this circum- stance seemed to me to influence the persistent ten- dency to congestion and haemorrhage from the vessels of the rectum. In the former, the haemorrhage was periodica], but not regularly so; and the symptom of digiti semi-mortui was present. At the end of some three years, the tendency to bleed disappeared with the menses, and she has since enjoyed good health. In the other case, haemorrhage returned some months after the second operation, but in a less de- gree. This lady showed evidences of venous dilata- tion in other regions of the body, and she belonged to a family who might be said to present a varicose diathesis. After the change of life, her bleedings, which had been irregularly paroxysmal, gradually](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b20409084_0063.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
