Paralysis and other diseases of the nervous system in childhood and early life.

  • Taylor, James.
Date:
1905
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Paralysis and other diseases of the nervous system in childhood and early life. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

    27/528 (page 15)
    diagnostic value. The temperature may remain low throughout, or it may become very high for a day or two before death—106°-108° F. Post-mortem hyperpyrexia is common. Vomiting, one of the most frequent invasion symptoms, continues at intervals throughout the illness, sometimes incessant, sometimes occasional. It is always of the pre- cipitate causeless type which characterises the vomiting of cerebral disease in children. Constipation is usually a marked and persistent symptom, but occasionally persistent looseness of the bowels occurs, and this is generally attributable to the presence of tuber- culous ulceration of the intestine. The course is progressive towards a fatal termination, and the end of the second week after marked symptoms have appeared finds the child extremely emaciated and comatose, with optic neuritis. Death occurs quietly from asthenia, sometimes from the embarrassment which accu- mulation of mucus in the chest places upon the respiration and circulation. Etiology—Age.—Tubercular meningitis, though it may occur at any age, is not frequently met with in infants under six months. It occurs more often in the second six months, and reaches a period of greatest incidence in the second and third years of life. After the fourth year it becomes year by year less frequent until adult life is reached, and a second period of maximum incidence lies between the sixteenth and twenty-fifth years of adult life. The frequency of the disease then rapidly declines from that time till old age is reached, when it is very rarely met with. The sexes are affected equally. Heredity.—While several members of the same family may suffer according to the well-known hereditary ten- dency of tuberculous disease, yet isolated cases of tuber- culous meningitis occur frequently in families in which no history of tuberculous disease is traceable for several generations, and more often, perhaps, than any other tuberculous manifestation. The absence of any cases of