A system of practical medicine. By American authors. Vol. 1 : $b Pathology and general diseases
History
A system of practical medicine. By American authors. Vol. 1 : $b Pathology and general diseases
Medicine -- Practice
If we look at the gums in a case of lead-poisoning, we may expect to
find a blue line along their edges. Scurvy is betokened by a swollen,
spongy, and easily-bleeding state of the gums. Many scorbutic cases,
however, lack this so-called pathognomonic feature. It may be
remarked, by the way, that absolutely pathognomonic signs of
particular diseases, never absent and exclusively seen in them, are
very few. Albuminuria, for example, is not always present in Bright's
disease, and is {152} also met with in a number of other affections.
Sugar in the urine may follow inhalation of chloroform or an attack of
cholera, as well as diabetes mellitus. Rice-water discharges may be
absent in the collapse of cholera, and patients may die with yellow
fever without black vomit. Still, these symptoms have great diagnostic
value, and, taken with others associated with them, may often enable
us to attain to a diagnosis of much importance.
Perfect teeth in an adult in this country are rather the exception
than the rule. In the notched incisors of inherited syphilis, however,
there is something quite distinctive. The notches in Hutchinson's
teeth are vertical, not horizontal.
Old as medicine is the examination of the tongue in disease. It may be
protruded with difficulty, as in low fevers, in apoplexy, and in
cerebral paralysis (bulbar sclerosis, glosso-labio-pharyngeal
paralysis) or thrust to one (the paralyzed) side in hemiplegia. It is
pallid in anæmia; yellow in bilious disorder; red in glossitis (then
swollen also), in scarlet fever, and in gastritis; furred in
indigestion, gastro-hepatic catarrh, and the early stage of various
febrile attacks; dry, brown, cracked, or fissured in typhus or typhoid
fevers and in the typhoid state of malarial remittent fever; bare of
epithelium in advancing phthisis and in imperfect convalescence from
severe acute diseases. Coldness of the tongue is one of the worst
signs in the collapse of cholera.
As we examine the throat internally we look for signs of faucial
inflammation in redness and swelling, with or without enlargement of
the tonsils, or relaxation and elongation of the uvula, or ulceration,
or the gray or brown membranous deposit of diphtheria. In the mouth of
a child we may find the little white vesicular patches called aphthæ,
the curd-like exudations of thrush, or possibly the much worse grayish
ulcerations of cancrum oris, or the rarer ashen sloughs of gangrene of
the mouth.
Outside of the throat we must remember the significance of glandular
swellings or scars of suppurated glands in children; nor overlook, if
present, stiffness of the muscles, or torticollis, or goitrous
enlargement of the thyroid gland. Observation should be made also of
the site of the carotid artery on each side, and of the jugular veins,
since aortic regurgitation may be indicated by violent action of those
arteries or tricuspid regurgitation by pulsation of the veins in the
neck.
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