United States or Zimbabwe ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Alcohol damages not only the nervous system, but also the blood vessels, and makes an unrivaled combination in favor of early syphilitic apoplexy, general paresis, and locomotor ataxia. A syphilitic who drinks at all is a bad risk, busily engaged in throwing away his chances of cure. Even mild alcoholic beverages are undesirable and the patient should lose no time in dropping them entirely.
Brinkley's hospital during the week of his treatment. Two weeks before his arrival a man suffering from locomotor ataxia had been carried in, unable to help himself at all. When the writer saw this man and talked with him he was up and dressed and walking about, without a cane, and he left for home after a total stay of something less than three weeks.
In locomotor ataxia the fractures affect especially the bones of the lower extremity, and may occur before there are any definite nerve symptoms, but they are more often met with in the ataxic stage, when the abrupt and uncontrolled movements of the limbs may play a part in their causation.
Neither is it necessary to contract specific diseases in order to fall a victim to these dreadful conditions: mercury, iodine and other destructive alternatives are given in a hundred different forms for a multitude of other ailments. A few years ago we had under our care a patient in the last stages of locomotor ataxy, who for years had been suffering the tortures of the damned.
They are reliable when they state observed facts, such as the following: It is now established in medical science that gonorrheal infection results in tens of thousands of cases in complications, such as heart disease, gonorrheal rheumatism, sterility of both men and women, blindness of infants, inflammatory diseases of female reproductive organs, and other well-marked sequelæ of the disease; and that syphilis is responsible for a large majority of cases of locomotor ataxia, paresis and certain types of insanity, and also for numerous aneurisms of arteries, many apoplexies, and much disease of liver, kidneys, and other organs.
Much confusion concerning the curability of chronic diseases by the various methods of treatment arises because people do not understand the difference between functional and organic chronic disease. For instance, there is a close resemblance between pseudo-and true locomotor ataxy. Often it is difficult to distinguish functional lung trouble from the organic type of the disease.
Frequently we have been severely criticised by our friends, our coworkers or our patients for accepting certain seemingly hopeless chronic cases. They exclaim: "You know this man has locomotor ataxy and that woman is an epileptic: you certainly do not expect to cure them," or, "Doctor, don't you think it injures the institution to have that dreadful-looking person around?
In the immediate present things are mean, dulled by wont, and perhaps even nauseating because of familiarity. There must be a change of scene to see the world; man is not sessile but locomotor; and the moment his life becomes migratory all the restraints and responsibilities of settled life vanish. It is possible to steal and pass on undiscovered and unsuspected, and to steal again.
Other parts higher up may be affected, and changes resulting in total blindness and deafness not infrequently occur. This does not, of course, mean that all pain in the stomach with vomiting means locomotor ataxia.
In the last years of his life he wrote but seldom. I give extracts from letters over a period of about eighteen years. My father and mother were very great personal friends of Newman's, consequently I saw a great deal of him during my early girlhood. My father was the late George Bucknall, of Rockdene, Weston-super-Mare, and for many years was a great invalid. He suffered from locomotor ataxy.
Word Of The Day