Pulmonary consumption, pneumonia, and allied diseases of the lungs : their etiology, pathology and treatment, with a chapter on physical diagnosis / by Thomas J. Mays.

  • Thomas Jefferson Mays
Date:
1901
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Pulmonary consumption, pneumonia, and allied diseases of the lungs : their etiology, pathology and treatment, with a chapter on physical diagnosis / by Thomas J. Mays. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    from which it derives its impulses, and that the strength and weakness of the one become the strength and weakness of the other. From what has been said thus far it is evident that the popular doctrine that the heart is very much more liable to embarrassment than the lungs is not supported by the facts of biology, and that instead of being more predisiJosed to disease it offers greater resistance to it than the respiratory organs. Neither is such a view favored by experimental or clinical experience. Ample evidence demonstrates that narcotics, like ether, chloroform, alcohol, opium, etc., the acute intoxication of all of which is confined more to the brain than it is to the peripheral nervous system, as a rule, arrest the action of the lungs liefore that of the heart. The same general relationship holds true between disease and injury of the brain and the respective vitality of these or- gans, as is shown by what is said on rcs])iratory paralysis, on page 138. The practical question of the relative viability of the heart and lungs in acute pneumonia is one of greatest im- portance, because at present there seems to be a tendency to direct more attention towards a prevention of cardiac than of pulmonary collapse in the treatment of this disease, indeed this trend is so strong that one might be led to be- lieve that pneumonia is a disease pertaining to the heart rather than to the lungs, and that all that is required to re- solve the pneumonic consolidation is to goad the heart with stimulants in order that it may pump the blood through tlie obstructed and impervious pulmonary capillaries. It is obvious, however, from a comprehensive study of the lethal tendency of this disease that its most threatening danger comes from a defective supply of nerve force to the lungs— from a pulmonary nerve exhaustion, which manifests itself not so much in a simple frequency of breathing, as it does in a frequent, laborious and shallow respiration.