United States or Gambia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


The puerperal abscesses are also contagious, and may be communicated to healthy lying-in women by washing with the same sponge; this fact has been repeatedly proved in the Vienna Hospital; but they are equally communicable to women not pregnant; on more than one occasion the women engaged in washing the soiled bed-linen of the General Lying-in Hospital have been attacked with abscess in the fingers or hands, attended with rapidly spreading inflammation of the cellular tissue."

"Doubtless the patient might have been saved in the first stages of the disease by the evacuation of the abscess; the incision would at first have acted similarly to spontaneous rupture into the intestine, but the relapse would have been prevented by permanent drainage, and a radical cure might have been brought about by the immediate or subsequent removal of the appendix.

If the pulse of either the merchant or the farmer had been due to peritonitis death would have ended either one before his abscess had broken. In fact diffuse peritonitis comes from perforation with discharge of the abscess contents into the peritoneal cavity, and it always spells death.

#Diagnosis.# A cold abscess is to be diagnosed from a syphilitic gumma, a cyst, and from lipoma and other soft tumours. The differential diagnosis of these affections will be considered later; it is often made easier by recognising the presence of a lesion that is likely to cause a cold abscess, such as tuberculous disease of the spine or of the sacro-iliac joint.

I have seen many cases, in which, by this mode of treatment, much suffering and perhaps the loss of some of the smaller joints have been prevented, particularly cases of deep seated inflammation of the fingers, which, having been neglected, have issued in severe inflammation, abscess, and terrible fungous growths.

The pike, eels, and carp eat greedily always, as everybody knows well, they feast on the vulture. Now suppose that next day, one of these eels, or pike, or carp, poisoned at the fourth remove, is served up at your table. Well, then, your guest will be poisoned at the fifth remove, and die, at the end of eight or ten days, of pains in the intestines, sickness, or abscess of the pylorus.

The abscess tends to increase in size by progressive liquefaction of the inner layers, caseation of the outer layers, and the further invasion of the surrounding tissues by tubercle bacilli. In this way a tuberculous abscess is capable of indefinite extension and increase in size until it reaches a free surface and ruptures externally.

"Ay, mother," whispered Janet, "I have mind o't." "Weel, an abscess o' some kind formed I kenna weel what it was, but it gathered and broke, and gathered and broke, till my breist's near eaten awa wi't. Look!" she cried, tearing open her bosom, and Janet's head flung back in horror and disgust. "O mother!" she panted, "was it that that the wee clouts were for?" "Ay, it was that," said her mother.

From this viewpoint, we can understand the intermittent temperature in a patient who is convalescing from an extreme infection, as peritonitis, pylephlebitis, multiple abscess of the liver, etc. In these conditions there may occur days of normal temperature, followed by an abrupt rise which will last for several days this in turn succeeded by another remittance.

Six weeks after the above adventure my father was attacked with an abscess in the head which carried him off in a week. Dr. Zambelli first gave him oppilative remedies, and, seeing his mistake, he tried to mend it by administering castoreum, which sent his patient into convulsions and killed him.