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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    or seventy a minute, the pulse is small and so rapid some- times that it becomes uncountable, and active delirium and convulsions are common complications. In the one the nervous system seems to be narcotized, as if overcome by opium intoxication, or laboring:; under a profound shock, and all its symptoms appear to be sulxlued and passive; while in the other the nervous system is apparently suffering from a wave of excessive irritability and instability, and behaves as if it were under the control of large doses of strychnine, and all the varied manifestations of the disease are presented in a violent and active form. That the diliference between these two ftjrms of jjueu- monia is largely accounted for by a difference in irritability of the brain and nervous system at the two extremes of life is confirmed by the fact that in tin.' pneumonia of alcohol- ism, of tlie chronic insane, of the feeble-aiiinded, of the deaf mules, etc., the symptoms run a similar course to that which is found in those of senile imeumonia. The poisonous action of alcohol destroys the irritability of the nervous system and reduces its physical level to that which olitains in chronic insanity, idiocy, etc.. and which is anal- ogous to that which is fnund in the aged. Want of nerve irritability also accounts for other clinical variations in pneumonia. Thus, for example, gangrene and aliscess of llie Itnigs, slow convalescence, etc., are more liable to follow pneumonia in jiersons with a depraved and vitiated nervous system than in those of ojjposite conditions. From what has thus been so imperfectly said it is obvious that by viewing acute pneumonia from the standpoint of develo]iment of the nervous system and not from that of its local origin in the lungs, its true pathological relation, to- gether with many of its therapeutic bearings, receive a scientific and truthful interpretation. So far as the author is able to see no other theory can unify and harmonize the varying factors of this disease so well, can so satisfactorily