Rheumatism, Gout and Some Allied Disorders (Classic Reprint) PDF Download

Author: Morris Longstreth
Publisher: Forgotten Books
ISBN: 9780656372751
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Excerpt from Rheumatism, Gout and Some Allied Disorders The position which rheumatism now occupies, as a nosological entity, is that of a group of symptoms, not necessarily and essentially connected, having a common or supposed common cause, without, however, any, as yet discovered, anatomical basis. That this should be the position of rheumatism, is the necessary result of varied opinions held concerning it from the earliest times until the present. At first the word was used like catarrh, to signify a defluxion of an acrid humor, generated in the brain, into various parts of the body, and later, after the catarrhal affec tions of the mucous membrane had been separated into a distinct group, denoted all diseases due to the circulation of acrid humors. Later still it was employed to denote the vague pains of the external parts, and after ward, when Ballonius distinguished it from gout, rheumatism was applied to the same group of symptoms to which it now appertains. It is no won der, therefore, that the term, as handed down to us, has as vague a signifi cance as some of the pain to which it has been and is at present applied. While at the present time we may hold more definitely in mind what we comprehend under the heading of rheumatism than was done formerly, when unquestionably neuralgia, pyaemia, coxalgia, and certain syphilitic afi'ections were included in this group, still it must be admitted that the acute and chronic forms of rheumatic articular disease and muscular rheu matism form a class which, if not pathologically dissimilar, are nevertheless joined together by only one common symptom, viz., pain, and one common cause, viz., cold. It is self-evident that these two bases are not sufficient grounds for founding either a pathological or an etiological group of disease. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.