Medical and physiological problems : being chiefly researches for correct principles of treatment in disputed points of medical practice / by William Griffin and Daniel Griffin.

  • Griffin, William.
Date:
1845
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Medical and physiological problems : being chiefly researches for correct principles of treatment in disputed points of medical practice / by William Griffin and Daniel Griffin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    cumstance perhaps scarcely deserving of remark if the occurrence was really rare. We might offer many evidences to prove that it takes place too often to be left at any time out of view in our consideration either of the prognosis or treatment of the disease. Mr. Gilbert Burnet and Dr. Macleod, in a discussion on the subject three years since at the Westminster Medical Society, detailed several cases, which, with few appearances indicative of danger, ran rapidly to coma and death,* and those published by Dr. Marsh in the Dublin Hospital Reports, illustrating the occasional connexion of jaundice with disease of the brain, were probably of a similar nature.f Dr. Gregory, of London, calls our attention to the probability of such termination in severe cases, and Dr. Mason Good speaks of the supervention of apo- plexy in green jaundice, chiefly in instances where the pulse was unusually slow. But it is neither in severe instances of the disease, nor in that intense form of it which has been called green, that it most frequently occurs; and nothing so clearly proves how little we really know of the pathology of these affections, than the fact, that the probability of the supervention of coma bears no relation to the intensity of the symptoms. In Dr. Macleod's cases there was little to indicate danger, until fatal coma occurred in one, and epilepsy, followed by coma and con- vulsions, in the other. In three of the instances which have preceded these remarks there was nothing that could lead one to anticipate immediate danger of any kind, until actual stupor commenced: they were not cases of green jaundice, and previous to the occurrence of fatal symptoms could not even be called severe or unusual. The general connexion existing between jaundice and certain affections of the brain or nervous system, which attracted the attention of physicians at a very early period of time, and to which the occurrence of the disease from intense passions of the mind has been attributed, while it tends to diminish our surprise at the occasional occurrence of coma, furnishes no clue to the sub- sisting relation; several explanations have from time to time been offered by those who have paid any attention to the facts, but none that are at all satisfactory. Unfortunately no post mortem * See Medical Gazette, vol. v. p. 631. t Dublin Hospital Ilepovts, vol. iii.