Foreign bodies in the air-passages : the substance of two clinical lectures delivered in the Western Infirmary, Glasgow / by Hector C. Cameron.

  • Cameron, Hector Clare, 1843-1928.
Date:
[between 1890 and 1899]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Foreign bodies in the air-passages : the substance of two clinical lectures delivered in the Western Infirmary, Glasgow / by Hector C. Cameron. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    fit of hearty huighter, and immediately an alarming paroxysm of ehoking and suffoeation occurred. Her mother, who was present, thought her dying, but after a time the attack passed off. On the ar- rival of a neighboring doctor, who had been hurriedly summoned, she secjned quite easy, and he concluded that the damson-stone, which she said had caused her choking, had passed into the stomach. Recurrent ])aroxysmal fits of coughing and choking led her parents to consult more than one medical man, but they all expressed doubts as to any foreign body being responsible for her symptoms. She then became a patient in one of our general hospitals, where she remained a fortnight under observation. The surgeon in charge of her case dismissed her at the end of that time, telling her relatives that he could see no reason for believing that there was a foreign body in the chest, and giving it as his opinion that there was some bronchitis of the left side of the chest, which, with care, would doubtless be recovered from. When I saw her she was extremely ill : emaciation was well marked, fever maintained, night-sweats profuse, cough most harassing and constant, and there Avas a copious purulent expectoration. My friend Dr. Samson Gemmell also saAV her, and had no difficulty in making out signs of cavity in the front and upper part of the left lung, which appeared to be consolidated throughout. The right side of the chest Avas to all intents and purposes free of any signs of pathological change. We both felt very certain that the child’s explanation of her OAvn illness Avas the correct one, and Ave decided that I should operate Avithout delay. These views Avere greatly strengthened by an interesting obser- vation made by the child shortly before Ave saAv her. She had for long suffered from no suffocative paroxysm such as accompanied the original entrance of the damson-stone into her larynx, but one day, Avhile cough- ing, a Amry similar and most alarming paroxysm ensued. As soon as she had sufficiently recovered from this to be able to speak, she said to her mother, “ Mother, it’s loose againindicating thereby that the body impacted in the chest had been once more coughed up, perceptibly to herself, into the larynx. This occurred several times, and so much did she dread the suffocative attacks that .she hit upon an ingenious device for jn-eventing the cnti’auce of the stone into the upper part of tlie air-passage. Whenever she felt herself about to cough, she firmly grasped the sides of her trachea at the root of the neck bctAA'cen her finger and thumb, and, by lateral compression of it, Avas able to bar the progress of the foreign body upAvards. This she Avas easily enabled to do by the attenuated state of her neck. On the day folloAviug Dr. Gemmell’s examination I performed