Gout and rheumatism in relation to disease of the heart / by A.W. Barclay.

  • Barclay, A. W. (Andrew Whyte), 1817-1884.
Date:
1866
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Gout and rheumatism in relation to disease of the heart / by A.W. Barclay. 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.

    23/240 (page 3)
    symptoms to wliicli the names so familiar to our ears have been respectively applied. To Dr. Garrod we owe the certainty of the existence of an excess of uric acid in the blood during the gouty paroxysm, and its absence in rheumatism. Many had groped in the dark at the expression of this fact before, because of the manifest relation that exists between the presence of an abnormal amount of uric acid in the secretion of the kidney, and the tendency to gout. We are now in possession of the knowledge that the uric acid is cir- culating in the system ; we know, too, that it gets fixed in the inflamed joint, but nearly all that associates these two facts with the attack of gout is purely hypothetical. It is far too mechanical a view to suppose that gout is nothing more than an accidental excess of uric acid in the blood : that the inflammation of the joint is simply the effect of the same acid in the form of urate of soda exudmo^ throuo^h the vessels, and irritating the hgamentous and synovial structures. The fallacy of such rea- soning becomes more apparent when we find Dr. Garrod asserting that true gouty inflam- mation is always accompanied with a deposi- B 2