On the etiology of leprosy / by G. Armauer Hansen.

  • Gerhard Armauer Hansen
Date:
1875]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the etiology of leprosy / by G. Armauer Hansen. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    experience impossible to determine how great an interval may be allowed in this respect. “We stand here before a great hiatus in our | knowledge, which Prof. Boeck also admits, while he does not attribute so great importance to it as I do in opposition to the cases collected in America. But it is my conviction that also a great - many of our lepers here at home are credited with too short a dura-. tion of disease. The patient’s explanation is nearly always uncertain and hesitating. It happens rather often that anzesthetics indicate a very short duration of disease, as they reckon the commencement of the disease from the marked loss of sensation and the manifestation ofatrophy. They have nothing to say about spots, and yet traces of the latter may often be observed with great ease ; the patients have no idea that they have had large and permanent spots fora long time, for only such spots leave evident traces. Still more easily may this occur with slight transient eruptions, which, as a rule, have their seat on the back and on the extremities, especially with people who seldom or never wash themselves. With tubercular patients it happens that they are conscious to having had slight eruptions or a slight discoloration in the face many years before the manifestation of the disease. According to experience hitherto such slight but yet suspicious skin eruptions have most nearly the character of an erythema nodosum. I shall briefly quote some cases of the disease in order to illustrate this. : 3 L. H—, No. 804. Mons. Randal, spotty leprosy. Had, about three - years before the affection existing when he was admitted, an eruption of red spots, tender to the touch and disappearing after about three weeks ; at the same time pains in his limbs. A similar eruption in the following year. Again in the following year in November a new eruption, and of the spots then produced there were at his adinission January Ist, 1873, only slight traces, from which leprosy could not with certainty be diagnosticated. More certain signs of the disease were the swellings of the inguinal and axillary lymphatic glands, and a slight insensibility along the outside of the backs of both feet, of which the patient himself had no conception. L. H—, No.:781.. Aslak Ljom. Tuberculous leprosy. Admitted September 14th, 1869 ; dates his disease from the spring, 1868, when there appeared tubercula on his thighs. In the spring of 1863 he had an eruption of red tender spots on the extremities, which lasted from four to five days; a similar but — not so strong eruption in the autumn of the same year and in the spring of 1864. tf Now, I consider that the leprosy in this last patient began in 1863, but he himself considers that 1t began five years later. I have already, in ‘ Nord. Med. Archives,’ communicated cases — as proofs that many years after the smooth form may seem to
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