A Practical Treatise on Diseases of the Skin in Children, from the Fr., with Notes, by R.H. Blake (Paperback)

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.1861 Excerpt: ... CACHECTIC CUTANEOUS DISEASES. The word cachexia has, like many other medical terms, often changed its signification, according to the systems and theories adopted by various authors. At present we understand by it, a constitution impoverished and depraved in consequence of organic or functional derangements. Cachexias may, in fact, be the result of a great variety of causes. They form the termination of a number of chronic affections, and present a great resemblance, whatever may have been the cause of their production. They may, without forcing the analogy, be in this respect compared to pains which so much resemble each other, notwithstanding the diversity of the pathological facts which may produce them. It is well known that, in aged individuals, and even in adults, cachexias influence the physiognomy of certain cutaneous affections peculiar to them. They, also, occasion a considerable variety of skin diseases. Many authors have made the more or less morbid and cachectic state play an important part in the aptitude for contracting parasitical affections. We have here classed under the name of cachectic diseases several cutaneous affections, the lesions of which are certainly very dissimilar; but nobody will, we think, deny their clinical relationship. In the second, and especially in the first, period of infancy, cachexias are quite as frequent as at the other ages of life, and in our own opinion they are even more frequent. Among the numerous causes tending to act energetically on new-born children there are some not sufficiently insisted upon; we allude to overcrowding and diet. Overcrowding is, in fact, the most fertile source of infant mortality. It creates with surprising rapidity the most deleterious and powerful miasmata. What occurs among adults...