On mycetoma, or, The fungus disease of India / by H. Vandyke Carter.

Date:
1874
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On mycetoma, or, The fungus disease of India / by H. Vandyke Carter. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    acquired. Wliat is made known in the present Memoir, has been elicited at some pains, and by personal effort, under the adverse influences of distant and tropical residence. To those surgeons in India, both European and native, who have aided me with specimens and other help, I hereby tender my best thanks. All published sources of information on practical points, I have carefully acknowledged; and as regards other particulars, such as the structure of ' Chionyphe C.,' I should not have hesitated to introduce borrowed illustrations, had it not appeared to me desirable to limit my figures to strictly original views, not hitherto published, and of themselves sufficient to elucidate the text. Obviously, what has been put forth, can only be very imperfect; and having above referred for solution of certain not irrational doubts, to the facts below displayed and arranged, I should prefer to discussion as to the value of negative or more obscure data, the turning of our attention to such desiderata as may be procurable, both in India and elsewhere. For instance :—what are the local conditions, as to soil, water and vegetation, outside the body, under which the two kinds of Mycetoma respectively prevail? Why in one person, the black sort; in another, the pale, shall, in one village, appear side by side? Does this difference depend upon inoculation at a different stage of development of the entophyte ? Can botanists tell us under what circumstances fungi and bacteria become interchangeable ? And, on the adoption of my views, may not surgeons be able to prevent the occurrence of Mycetoma, in much-infected locahties ? Then, as concerns the malady itself, it should be well ascertained if it always begins in the same way; precisely, how it spreads in the foot; what its period of incubation; what the conditions of slow or quick growth, within the body. Let the inter- and co-relations of the fungus-particles (entophyta) be elucidated: so let, in all essential details, the cor- respondence between clinical and natural history of the several varieties of the disease. It is strange, but significant, that these varieties do not co-exist in the foot, and are not, seemingly, connected by intermediate forms : where are the transitional phases that should exist, except upon the view proposed, that even the diverse particles have a common special origin ? When, however, these and like topics, are put forward, one is apt to be discouraged and even somewhat dismayed, at the slender hold upon facts that is available, even in so isolated and uncomplicated a complaint, as is this of the fungus-disease; but still, I will end these prefatory remarks with the expression of a hope, that the work which they herald, may prove to be both interesting to the naturalist and useful to the surgeon, especially in India and the East. July, 1874.