Identification of Muscular Rheumatism
But to resume our thread, one great step forward we owe to Cullen, who not only differentiated acute from chronic articular rheumatism, but also clearly portrayed the clinical distinctness from both of muscular rheumatism. In so doing, he materially assisted in the differentiation of these same disorders from gout. But at the same time, owing to his immoderate advocacy of “chill” as the one great cause of rheumatism in all its forms, he undoubtedly retarded progress. For immediately there arose a cloud of witnesses who claimed a “rheumatic kinship” for a myriad visceral disorders, the victims of which had suffered exposure. Thus throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries many of the conditions now assigned to irregular gout were affiliated instead to rheumatism.