Vascular bronchocele and exophthalmos / [J. Warburton Begbie].

  • Begbie, James Warburton, 1826-1876.
Date:
1882
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Vascular bronchocele and exophthalmos / [J. Warburton Begbie]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    by otters the term is not understood in so formidable a light. Trousseau, who has evidently the most serious view of a cachexia, sees none in the maladie de Graves and, again, by Basedow and others, who have employed this word in their descriptions of the disease under consideration, it has very evidently been used as precisely synonymous with chlorosis, anaemia, or hydraemia. This is very clearly shown in the able observations of M. Beau during the discussion in the French Imperial Academy of Medicine.^ Lieutaud, he reminds the Academy, was the first to employ the term anaemia, though long antece- dent to his time the characteristic features of anaemia had been with accuracy observed—to wit, pallor, swelling, feebleness, and flaccidity, which most readily arrest attention—and to the same assemblage of symptoms the word cachexia has also been applied. M. Beau further quotes from Felix Plater a passage, in which, under the name of cachexia, precisely the symptoms of ansemia, as now generally understood, are included —to use M. Beau’s own language, “ the ordinary symptoms of our modern anaemia.” Every feature of anaemia is indeed noticed in this description of cachexia by Plater, if we except the important auscultatory phenomena, the discovery of which was reserved for Laennec and his successors. “ Cachexia,” he says, “ is a disease accompanied by discoloration of the skin, in which the florid hue is lost, and, for the most part, the proper appearance of the body is changed; hence the term cachexia. In this disease the skin becomes white, or grows pale, or acquires a livid hue, or turns to a leaden aspect, while the surfaee of the body acquires a swollen appearance. The affection is generally accompanied by dyspnoea, which chiefly attacks the sufferers in walking, or ascending heights, with palpitations of the arteries in the neck, and of the heart, and with weakness of the limbs. While (Plater coneludes) all may suffer from this disease, it is peculiarly apt to affect young women.” The cachexia, then, which is thus defined, or a condition nearly identical with it, is evidently the state or appearance of body with which the more remarkable features of the disease under consideration are held by some writers to be associated. And this cachexia is surely nothing more or less than an anaemia. In such a depraved condition of body as either of these terms may be held to express ’ ‘Bulletin de 1 Academie Impdriale de Mddecine,’ tome xxvii, p. iioi.