A Treatise on Pyrosis Idiopathica, or Water-Brash, as Contrasted with Certain Forms of Indigestion and of Organic Lesions of the Abdominal Organs (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 3children as in adults, from occasional offences in diet, the acute observer may notice the rudiment (so to say) of a pyrosis; for although in these cases the fluid is sensibly secreted and collected in the mouth only, yet there can be no doubt that a similar action is going on by sympathy in the terminal vessels of the stomach. Physiologists have referred the secretion of the proper gastric juice to the stomach only, (and even this is a disputed point;) but an abundance of facts will serve to show, that the whole surface, from the mouth to the pylorus, secretes a liquor which assists and is subservient to digestion. Pyrosis then, in this our view, is only an aggravation of one of the common symptoms of derangement of the stomach. The pathological condition of the organ is one of great debility. For what is the affection but a dropsy of an open cavity ? What is its proximate cause but an exhausted and disturbed state of nervous energy ? The older writers distinguished the worse forms of dyspepsia by the term ' resolution of the stomach,' or (as we should say) a languid, palsied condition of the pneumo-gastric and sympathetic nerves; and the very terms thus selected would show that they considered the containing cause to be, want of energy of the nerves and fibre of the stomach itself. In asserting that it is a dropsy of an open cavity, I am aware that it is a secretion of a mucous membrane, and duly bear in mind all the differences of the two tissues. Nevertheless, for practical purposes, I consider the analogy to be sufficiently strong; and I will go further and Section 4add, that they who are in years, and pyrotic, will not be long without dropsy, unless the condition of stomach be improved. Dr. Macbride, in his Practice of Physic, has observed two conditions of the fluid rejected in this complaint, ...