A Popular Treatise on Medical Philosophy (Electronic book text)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. Excerpt from book: Section 3CHAPTER IV.; ' ' " ... DISEASES -OF THE DIGESTIVE ORGANS. Dr. Good enumerates one hundred and forty-seven varieties of diseases that affect the digestive organs. It is but seldom that one of these affections appears alone, and under its own peculiar, -distinctive, features; for all parts, of the digestive apparatus being closely associated by nervous communication, it so happens that when one important organ is diseased, others are also involved by sympathy- Age so modifies the same variety of disease that it presents a different aspect in childhood from that which it exhibits in middle life, or in one still more advanced in years. Temperament also varies the disease; and the maladies that affect the digestive organs, as well as those.of other parts of Ihe system, are all modified, or more or less changed in their appearance and nature, by climate, season, locality, occupation, habit, sex, and by the multiplicity of circumstances with which man is surrounded. . .; - ';; .. The causes of disease are as various as the circum- ' %. . i '. stances which modify and change its aspect; and among the most prominent of those which induce affections of the digestive organs may be reckoned, exposure to cold and wet in any; manner, improprieties in diet, both as regards, quantity and quality, eating at irregular and unsea- sonable hours, .imperfect mastication, passions and affections of the mind, fatigue, and other influences equally injurious. The multiplicity? and varied forms, of the diseases in question, have 'been well established by the effect of medical treatment, observations upon the living, and, more than all, by examinations of the dead, textit{Sec. 1. textit{Medical Treatment.: When disease, from a multiplicity of causes, and the influence of circuitistances, assum es an ...