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4
CHRONOLOGICAL.
A few facts arranged chronologically respecting this disease (which I
may point out has been recognised from very early ages, for it may surprise
many to learn that it is not a modern disease, but one that was well recognised
and written about more than two thousand years ago) will be valuable as
showing that its treatment and prevention have always been an object of great
concern.
B.C. 436-338. Isocrates, one of the ten great Athenian orators, a teacher
of Xenophon and other great Greeks, in a speech on behalf of a client who
claimed to inherit his father's estate on the ground that he had nursed him
while suffering from phthisis contrary to the advice of his friends, who said
that nearly every person, who nursed this disease, died of it themselves.
B.C. 400. Hippocrates, the father of medicine, seems to have been well
acquainted with it, for he describes an acute attack of phthisis. " Consumption,"
he wrote in his Epidemica (Lib. I, 2). " which then (i.e., the beginning
of spring, through the summer and towards the winter) prevailed, and the only
one (i.e., disease) which proved fatal to many persons. Most of them were
affected by these diseases in the following manner. Fevers Accompanied by
rigors of the continued type, acute, having no complete intermissions, but of
the form of the semi-tertians, being milder the one day, and the next having an
excitation, and increasing in violence, constant sweats, but not diffused over
the whole body; extremities very cold, and warmed with difficulty, bowels disordered,
with bilious, scanty, unmixed, thin, pungent and frequent dejections.
The urine was thin, colourless, unconcocted, or thick with deficient sediment,
not settling favourably, but casting down a crude and unseasonable sediment.
Sputa small, dense, concocted, but brought up rarely, and with difficulty, and
in those who encountered the most violent symptoms there was no concoction
at all, but they continued throughout spitting crude matters. Their fauces, in
most of them, were painful from first to last, having redness with inflammation ;
defluxions, thin, small, and acrid; they were soon wasted and became worse,
having no appetite for any kind of food throughout; no thirst, most persons
delirious when near death. So much concerning the phthisical affections."
Again, in another part of the same work (Lib. III, 14), he wrote with
respect to the predispositions to phthisis thus:—" The form of the body peculiarly
subject to phthisical complaints was the smooth, the whitish, that resembling the
lentil, the reddish, the blue-eyed, the leucophlegmatic, and that with the
scapula; having the appearance of wings."