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
may certainly contribute to awake respiratory movements. The advice to
wait quietly until the attack has passed by is more easily given than
carried out. Marshall Hall's direction to perform tracheotomy will, I
hope, soon be forgotten.
Nothing is more gratefully appreciated by the little patients than air.
May it never be forgotten that night-air is better than foul air, and
that furnace-air means air greatly modified by injurious additions.
More than twenty years ago I was in occasional attendance upon a male
baby--now a medical man of some promise--with craniotabes and a number
of general convulsions. No treatment would remove, or even relieve, the
attacks, until, without the physician's advice, the father took the
baby into the street in the hardest winter weather. After the first
long absence from his furnace the baby was well of his convulsions, and
the physicians profited by their involuntary experience.
In the same way that salt-bathing is beneficial, so is sea-air. A
summer at the seaside is a great blessing to rachitical children.
Sea-baths have been arranged for them in France (Berx-sur-mer), in
Italy (San Ilario di Nervi, Viarreggio, Livorno, Volti, Fano), in
England (Margate), in Germany (German Sea, by Prof. Beneke), and for
some little time past in the neighborhood of our own large cities.
{164} Complications command great attention in rachitis, particularly
where there is danger from the affection of the nerve-centres, for the
slightest irritation in some distant part of the body may give rise to
an outbreak. Thus, in craniotabes it is desirable to watch even the
gums. Not sharing the etiological superstition which attributes so many
diseases of infancy to dentition, I still know that a slight irritation
of the gums may suffice to exhaust the slim resisting power of the
infant. If there be local swelling and congestion of the gums over a
growing tooth, it may become necessary, or at least advisable, to
lance. An otitis which under ordinary circumstances would give rise to
no symptoms at all besides some inconvenience or slight pain will prove
the source of great danger in a rachitical (craniotabic) infant. The
chronic bronchial catarrh and frequent broncho-pneumonia of such
patients require early attention, for they and the neighboring
lymphatic glands stand too much in the relation of a vicious circle of
cause and effect.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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