Francis Le Roy Satterlee
Published: 2012-07
Total Pages: 62
Get eBook
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. CHRONIC ARTICULAR RHEUMATISM DEFINITION. A sub-acute disease, chronically persistent, remittent or intermittent in character, directly, or remotely supervening upon acute rheumatism, and manifesting itself by pain and certain structural disturbances at the site of one or more of the articulations. CAUSATION. Without disregard of, or disrespect to, the time- honored assertion of possible spontaneity in the origin of the disease, it will be perhaps more convenient to consider chronic articular rheumatism as the immediate or remote result of some sharply accentuated, or perhaps hardly definable, or even unre- membered, attack of acute inflammatory rheumatism. To accept the oft reiterated opinion that this affection of the joints is at times of independent origin is, perhaps, yielding to empiricism rather than reason. It would seem that either the term chronic rheumatism is a misnomer, or the condition should be admitted, without exception, as dating its causation from an acute rheumatic seizure, however mild or unappreciated that may have been. While the term chronic may signify protracted duration, its general medicaluse expresses the sub-acute continuation of a past acute condition, and it would seem equally consistent to speak of a chronic pneumonia, pleurisy, or gonorrhoea, as likely to obtain spontaneously and without reference to some initial acute stage. Whether there remains in the system some effete, and therefore indifferently active, morbific principle, sufficiently typical of the initial poison to continue its selective action on those joints which have become a locus minoris resistentice, or whether the disturbance to the structural components of the articulations affected at the time of the acute process was of such a character as to render i...