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Remarks on Diabetes Especially with Reference to Treatment
Remarks on Diabetes Especially with Reference to Treatment Author:William Richardson 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. Causes Of Diabetes. In speaking of the causes of Diabetes we must ever remember that they act only in certain conditions of the body, and these ... more »conditions are unknown, and will probably ever remain so, until we see such causes act. There is therefore in all cases of Diabetes a something added to the body, not discoverable it is true, which makes causes, that would otherwise be inoperative, produce the disease in question. Causes may be divided into predisposing and exciting. I. Predisposing. Constitutional predisposition. This has been disputed, but most authors are agreed in attributing much influence to this cause. The following consideration should have some weight in determining the question; there are three elementary principles which serve for the nutrition of the healthy body, Albuminoid, Fatty, and Saccharine or Amylaceous : from a defect of assimilation of the first we have gout or gravel: from a defect in the second we have fat deposited in various parts of the body: and from a defect in the third we have Gly- cosuria or Diabetes. As the first two are universally allowed to be constitutional or hereditary, so I think ought also the third. Authors describe numbers of cases of Diabetes that appeared in the same family and amongst near relations. I have seen Diabetes in a brother and two sisters, and a cousin, and I think there can be no doubt of its being hereditary. I have been much struck in my patients with the number of their near relations who have been affected with diseases that are allowed to be hereditary; consumption and scrofulous diseases being especially prevalent: one patient, for instance, had a mother die of consumption, a sister of hydrocephalus, a brother from scrofulous knee-joint, another sister from malignant disease of the wo...« less