Author Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1908 edition. Excerpt:... strumous swellings, is now for the most part diverted into the spinal marrow, so that the strumae deprived of nutriment, soon dry up. 4. The bones are always more or less bent in this disease, particularly the bones of the leg and of the forearm. The joints also are often inclined outwards; the extremities of the ribs, where they join with the cartilages of the sternum, are nodose; the bones of the joints are protuberant; also the whole spine is bent variously, here outward, here inward. I do not think that this curvature of the bones is owing to their flexibility, because the children afflicted with this disease have rather larger and firmer bones than others, as will later be shown at some length; yet as this curvature of the bones is very notable, I may be allowed to discuss it somewhat more fully, and I shall first give the learned Dr Glisson's opinion, and then shortly state my own. Dr Glisson says: "Let us compare the bones which are apt to be curved to a pillar; and indeed we may do so quite properly, for if they are erect, they correspond to a sort of pillar, and thence we deduce a demonstration explanatory of this circumstance: let, then, a, 5, c (Plate IV., Fig. 1) be a pillar composed of three stones placed one on the top of the other; we shall suppose it such that every side is perpendicular and of the same height; if, then, we insert a wedge on the right side between the stones a and b, along the line f, d, the head of the pillar, that is, the highest stone, will be inclined towards d, and make an angle at d, and the height of the pillar will be greater on the right side than on the left, as is shown in Plate IV., Fig. 2. Similarly, if you push in another wedge along the line g, e, between the stones b and c, the pillar will...