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This is an OCR edition with typos.
Excerpt from book:
CHAPTER III. COMPLICATED FORMS OF PULMONARY CONSUMPTION. If pulmonary consumption is defined to be a deposition of tubercles in the lungs, then all those diseased states accompanying it, as well as those arising from tubercular deposit in other organs, must be considered to be complications of consumption. Taking then this view of the subject, that species of dyspepsia called strumous must certainly belong to the complications, instead of being itself a stage of pulmonary consumption. For sometimes the disease runs its course unaccompanied with dyspepsia, and dyspepsia is a very common affection in persons uncontaminated with pulmonary consumption. Hence we may conclude that its strumous character depends on the accidental circumstance of its being engrafted on a consumptive constitution. It might, moreover, a priori, be expected that dyspepsia would exist during an attack of consumption, from the enfeebled state of the organisation then present, combined with irregular appetite. Under the head of complications, are fatty degeneration of the liver, and diseases of the heart. The symptoms of the former are so obscure as to afford little indication of its existence; while both functional and structural diseases of the heart are to be detected in their earliest stages. Both are found co-existing with consumption, but in this country the former less frequently occurs. Functional disease of the heart is often conjoined with dyspepsia, and is probably due to reflex-action. It manifests itself by palpitation, faintness, irregularity of pulse, difficulty of breathing, and on the application of the ear or stethoscope over the left ventricle by a bruit. Structural disease of the heart is more commonly met with in an after stage of consumption, such as dilatation, with sometimes hyp...