On Asthma; Its Pathology and Treatment (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. 1878 Excerpt: ...insufficient to solve this obscure problem. At the present stage of civilisation, every individual creates for himself, or otherwise obtains, an atmosphere in which he thrives or decays. The state of the weather will undoubtedly affect, in a different manner, the inhabitant of Belgravia and of Bethnal Green. Both may bestow the same anxious and efficient care to ward off the cold; yet, while the one escapes unhurt, the other catches bronchitis. The influence of the weather would here be very remote. Its injuriousness would be admissible only if it could be shown that those who most expose themselves to 1 Fried rich Falk, Ueber Entstehung von Erkaltwngs-Krankheiten; Reichert u. Du Bois-Reymond's Arch., 1874, p. 159 et seq. 2 Handb. d. histor.geograph. Pathologic Erlangen, 1862-1864, Bd. ii, p. 2-19. the supposed cause, are also the most frequent sufferers of its assumed consequences; and herein statistics not only fail, but prove just the opposite. These considerations are dictated by what daily experience suggests, and they are decidedly adverse to the prevalent doctrine. It is needless to refer to those well known instances where delicate as well as strong persons daily sustain, deliberately or unconsciously, considerable losses of temperature. Yet in no single instance has such loss alone produced inflammation of an internal organ. The question is not whether cold can, under no conditions, be hurtful. Nobody doubts that, if an animal be kept in a tin box surrounded with ice, the temperature of the body will decrease to 18 or 20 C, and that death may thus ensue from paralysis of the heart and oedema of the lungs.1 These are experiments that happily have their counterpart but rarely in practice. But that is not the point at issue. The supposition is that if...