The soldier's heart and the effort syndrome / by Thomas Lewis.

  • Thomas Lewis
Date:
[1918]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The soldier's heart and the effort syndrome / by Thomas Lewis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    These types of giddiness have little or no prognostic value. In patients who complain persistently of giddiness, the effects of simple tests, such as quick change of posture, should be observed. Giddiness of the same type is not an infrequent symptom in cases of early structural heart disease, such as mitral stenosis and aortic valve lesions. Headache. Headache, frontal and throbbing in type and often severe enough to send a man voluntarily to bed, is not uncommon. It is usually an after-symptom of exercise. Sweating and other peripheral phenomena. Excessive sweating is frequent and it at times leads to complaint. It is frequently to be noticed in the palms of the hands while the patients are at rest, and it is a common experience to note sweat drops trickling from the axillse while patients stand stripped in a cool or cold room. Relatively mild stimuli, such as easy exercise or emotion, may produce conspicuous sweating of the forehead and body ; in some patients a bedewed brow is almost constant, in a number the skin is greasy or actually moist. In a few patients the hands stream with perspiration during emotion and are always wet. Such soldiers complain that the sweat constantly rusts their rifles. Not uncommonly there are other peripheral phenomena in the same class of patient. One of the most noteworthy of these is blueness or a flush, simple or of mottled colour, of the hands. It is present in a very large proportion of the patients and is usually associated with coldness of the extremities. Dermatographism (simple or urticarial) is very common. Numbness of the fingers accompanied by pallor and by pain is not rare ; in some cases it is sufficient
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