On Rheumatism, Rheumatic Gout, and Sciatica; Their Pathology, Symptoms, and Treatment (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: A suggestion was thrown out by Dr. Prout, and has been adopted and enlarged upon by Dr. Todd in his Croouian Lectures, that all the phenomena of the disease are referable to the presence of lactic acid, which is developed too freely in the system in consequence of imperfect assimilation, and accumulates in the blood by reason of defective cutaneous action. " It is no wonder," says Dr. Todd, " that as lactic acid is imperfectly excreted through its natural channels, in consequence of the influence of cold in checking perspiration, and is too freely developed in the alimentary canal, it should accumulate in the blood and become eliminated at every point. Moreover, the long continuance of the causes which produce the defective cutaneous secretion and the deranged gastric one, will give rise to the development of lactic acid in the secondary processes of assimilation, thus infecting the blood from every source, and tending to perpetuate the diathesis." More recently this view has been somewhat modified, and has received more complete and satisfactory elucidation, from Dr. Headland, in his valuable treatise on the action of medicines.1 After referring to the commonly received opinion, that before the starch of the food can be applied to the maintenance of the animal heat, it has to be converted into lactic acid, which then combines with oxygen to form carbonic acid and water, in which form it is thrown out of the system by the lungs, he points out how anything which interferes with this oxidation of lactic acid, must lead to its excessive accumulation in the system. He thus suggests that simple " want of vital energy or nervous force," or " a failure of some natural principle which is gifted with the control and direction" of the chemical changes in the blood; or, in short, any d...