Some clinical aspects of pernicious anaemia / by Herbert French.

  • French, Herbert Stanley, 1875-1951.
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Some clinical aspects of pernicious anaemia / by Herbert French. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    be highest when the patient is most ill and anjemic, and to become lower as the condition improves. This is no absolute rule, however, for a high colour index may persist even when much improvement has occurred; on the other hand a low index is sometimes found when the patient is very ill. It is astonishing how quickly the index may vary: it may be high one week and low the next. (6) The injustice of the epithet “pernicious” in some cases.—The use of the term pernicious leads to an erroneous idea of the prognosis. It is true that hardly any patients with typical pernicious anaemia ever completely recover. It is also true that the end sometimes occurs within a month or a few months of what seems to be the beginning of the disease. On the other hand, the average duration of pernicious anaemia from the time of its recognition until death is in a fair number of cases to be measured in years. Moreover, the illness is not one of continuous downward progress like that of carcinoma of the stomach for example, for nothing in medicine perhaps is so striking as the way in which, even if the rally be only temporary, a patient who may seem to be in extremis from pernicious anaemia, with his red corpuscles under 20 per cent, of normal, may recuperate, not only once, but several times. Out of 40 cases the writer has found that the interval between recognition of the disease and death in 15 was more than a year, and that in 8 of these the patient survived the diagnosis from 2 to 10 years. Lymphatic leukaemia is far more per- nicious a complaint than is pernicious anaemia. (7) The difficulty in accurately DATING THE BEGINNING OF THE ILLNESS.—