A system of practical medicine. By American authors. Vol. 3 : $b Diseases of the respiratory, circulatory, and hæmatopoietic systems
Science
A system of practical medicine. By American authors. Vol. 3 : $b Diseases of the respiratory, circulatory, and hæmatopoietic systems
Medicine -- Practice
Some of these grave attacks of sudden dyspnoea are explained by the
participation of the submucous tissue in the morbid process. When that
occurs, adults also, who as a rule do not suffer from dyspnoea in
laryngeal catarrh, are badly affected. The symptoms are rigor, high
temperature, pain, hoarseness or aphonia, a barking cough, labored
expectoration--which is sometimes bloody--dyspnoea, orthopnoea,
cyanosis. In some cases, to which the name of laryngitis gravis or
acutissima has been given, the symptoms grow urgent to such a degree
that tracheotomy alone is capable of saving life.
Otherwise, the severity of the symptoms does not go parallel with the
local lesions. Particularly in children, hoarseness, cough, and
dyspnoea are liable to be grave, while the local hyperæmia is not
intense at all. A pharyngeal catarrh is very apt to increase the
suffering. Complications with tracheitis or bronchitis are liable to
prolong the course of the disease and to render respiration--which is
not accelerated in laryngeal catarrh--more frequent. Otherwise, the
disease runs a favorable course. Remissions of the severe attacks which
may occur in several successive nights take place in the morning.
Expectoration, which in the beginning was either absent or scanty,
becomes soon more copious and mucous; the hard, barking, loud cough
grows looser with increasing secretion. In most cases the violence of
the affection is broken in from three to five days, and the disease
runs its full course in a week or two. But hoarseness may remain behind
for some time; in rare cases aphonia has become permanent and relapses
are frequent. Not infrequently children are presented who are reported
to have had croup five or ten or more times. In some families all the
children are subject to laryngeal catarrh, and hereditary influence
cannot be doubted.
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