Guys Hospital Reports Vol. XIII

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1868. Excerpt: ... Thk value of the study of morbid anatomy has never had a stronger proof than it is receiving from the service it has rendered, and is rendering, in showing that syphilis causes grave and fatal visceral diseases, which are easily recognised. When John Hunter wrote-- The brain, heart, stomach, liver, and kidneys, and several other viscera, have never been known to be affected by syphilis/' he expressed the truth, as far as it is seen in common experience, of what I may call the surgical stage of syphilis; but now-a-days a medical stage of syphilis has to be recognised, which had not then drawn special attention. The labours of Dittrich, who showed the morbid anatomy of syphilitic lesions, deserve to rank with those of Bright, and this not less for the bold, comprehensive, and correct conclusion which either observer drew from his observations than for the frequency and gravity of the disease concerned in either case; while, in one respect, the demonstration of these syphilitic lesions surpasses in value even Bright's great discovery, inasmuch as a more definite and hopeful plan of treatment is indicated by the discovery of syphilis than by the discovery of Bright's disease of the kidney. Though the further labours of Wilks, Bristowe, and other observers have done for Dittrich's discovery more than Rayer and Christison did for Bright's, even now I am persuaded that the frequency of syphilitic causation of medical disease is not usually so familiar and ready to the mind as it should be in order to the early detection of it under the very various forms in which it comes clinically before the physician. Until the doctrine which ascribes to syphilis the lesions in question is universally and fully allowed and put into practice I conceive that those who have con...