Birmingham Medical Review - 1892 Author:Unknown Author 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: PATHOLOGICAL AND CLINICAL NOTES, WITH ESPECIAL REFERENCE TO DISEASE IN THE AGED. BY B. FURNEAUX JORDAN, M.B., RESIDENT MEDICAL OFFICER AT WORKHOUSE INFI... more »RMARY. After having been brought for some months in close contact with disease as met with in the aged, I have been struck with one great peculiarity. It is that I have very often noticed that grave and widespread pathological lesions have been accompanied by but comparatively trifling symptoms, and that even an acute exacerbation of disease has shewn itself in some cases by slight intensification only of the general symptoms and not by acute and diagnostic phenomena. Acute disease may be more fatal to the aged than to those in the prime of life, but its onset is more gentle and gradual. The aged may be struck down with the iron hand, but that hand is often clothed in the velvet glove. The symptoms of fatal disease are often subdued with the subdued and lowered vitality of the patient. This view was first Of all impressed on me by a consideration of several cases of carcinoma of the oesophagus in old men. Those cases I met with in the course of post mortem work during the last year, and before giving a short account of them I intend to refer not only to the characteristic mentioned above, but to the general impressions which they left on my mind. Those impressions were :— 1. The comparative frequency of ossophageal carcinoma.—This is specially noticeable when compared with the frequency of malignant disease of other portions of the alimentary canal. Out of about 100 post mortems selected simply for their general interest, and made too at an institution where many afflicted with malignant disease come in to die, I met with 10 cases of cesophageal carcinoma, with 6 cases of intestinal, and with strange to say, only...« less