Aetiology and semeiology : consisting of Aretæus on the causes and signs of acute diseases; and Schill's Outlines of pathological semeiology.

Date:
1841
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Aetiology and semeiology : consisting of Aretæus on the causes and signs of acute diseases; and Schill's Outlines of pathological semeiology. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Woodruff Health Sciences Center Library at Emory University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Woodruff Health Sciences Center Library, Emory University.

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    sour eructations, tasting of bile, accompanied with shivering and nausea; the bowels are generally relaxed, with scanty bilious and slimy stools. These affections have always their exacerbations. There is no great aberration of mind, but the patients are absent and stupified; great lassitude, cold extremities, trembling and chilliness, spasmodic hiccough, jaundice, and general suffusion of the body with bile, are the attendants. If jaundice appear before the end of the week, it carries very many off. Those who do not, either by hemorrhage or profuse alvine dis- charges of copious bilious dejections, or a large quantity of clear urine, avert the mischief, become affected at the end of three weeks with hepatic abscess, or if they escape longer without abscess, the disease ends in incurable dropsy ; there is thirst, though the patients drink little ; the body is dry, and lean : there is longing for sour substances, but no taste. Autumn engenders this disease, from the indigestion that attends on eating the varied produce of this sea- son -3 adults are most liable to it, CHAPTER VIII. ON ACUTE AFFECTIONS OF THE VENA CAVA. A broad central vein shoots from the porta? of the liver to its ex- tremity, which, after splitting into many fine divisions, finally spreads through all its substance into branches that are at last be- come invisible, and the terminations of another set of veins anasto- mose with their extremities, which, at first small and numerous, become larger and fewer, and at last unite in the middle of the liver, so as to form one large vessel. At this spot it divides into two branches which proceed across the gland, the one having tra- versed its principal lobe, makes its appearance on its convex border, and then perforating the diaphragm joins the heart, this is called the Vena Cava. The other after passing underneath the fifth lobe to its convex edge goes to the spine, and from this spot extends along it as far as the Ischia ; this vein is also called Cava, having the same name> for it is in fact one and the same vessel, and has its origin from the liver, and a probe might be passed either from the superior cava in the heart to that vessel which lies beside the spine, or from the one beside the spine through the liver to the heart, for its course is identical. This is the vein which I think is affected in acute and violent disease ; for it is all one, though there ar^ other, physicians who conceive that it is the vein only that lies along the spine that is affected, because the symptoms are not evident in the vein that goes to the heart; but as this extends, and adheres to no other part within the thorax, but is raised above the surface of the diaphragm till it joins this organ, if any serious disease did attack it; it would be masked from the thorax surrounding it.