A system of practical medicine. By American authors. Vol. 2 : $b General diseases (continued) and diseases of the digestive system
Science
A system of practical medicine. By American authors. Vol. 2 : $b General diseases (continued) and diseases of the digestive system
Medicine -- Practice
Some of the most distressing symptoms to which gouty persons are
especially liable are those connected with the passage of gravel from
the kidney to the bladder. Where gravel alone passes, it may cause
little uneasiness, and the fact is only recognized through the
discovery of blood in the urine in connection with uric acid or calcium
oxalate crystals. When, however, the sand forms concretions in the
pelvis of the kidney, their dislodgment and passage through the ureter
are accompanied by the well-known agonies of renal colic.
Dysuria is a symptom from which gouty persons often experience much
inconvenience and suffering. It is usually associated with extremely
acid urine of high density containing crystalline sediments. It may
manifest itself only in frequent and painful micturition, or it may be
associated with such a degree of vesical tenesmus as to cause retention
and necessitate the use of the catheter.
DIAGNOSIS.--If the term gout be restricted to that form of arthritis in
which an excess of urates is found in the blood with tophous deposits
in the affected joints, the cartilages of the ear and nose, and in the
subcutaneous connective tissue, then the diagnosis of this disease is a
simple one. It is a disease with a pathognomonic sign. But if the
pathology of gout consists rather in a more complex morbid condition of
the blood, of which an excess of urates in the serum is only one of a
number of phenomena, and not necessarily the sole and essential cause
of the local lesions, then the question of diagnosis involves a
consideration of all the correlated morbid conditions which are so
frequently associated in gouty persons and gouty families as to justify
the inference that they have a common origin in a perverted nutrition,
the essential nature of which is imperfectly understood.
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