McCoy has combined carbon dioxide snow local treatment with chaulmoogra oil. The lesions showed decrease in size but remained bacteriologically positive.
SECTION III
FOOD DEFICIENCY DISEASES
CHAPTER XVIII
BERIBERI
Definition and Synonyms
Definition.—Beriberi is a food deficiency disease due to the absence from the dietary of a neuritis-preventing vitamine. It is particularly important among the people of the Orient whose diet is preponderatingly one of rice. In milling the grain the outer vitamine-containing layers are rubbed off and this polished rice, when the chief constituent of a dietary, is capable of causing, after a period of two or three months, a peripheral neuritis.
This neuritis not only involves the nerves of the extremities but, as well, the pneumogastric, and it is the manifestation of cardiac disturbances which best differentiate this form of neuritis from those due to alcohol or arsenic.
The disease is usually described under two types: (1) a wet or dropsical beriberi, in which the vasomotor nerves are affected with resultant general oedema and (2) a dry atrophic or paraplegic type, in which muscular palsies and atrophies are the leading features. Pathologically, we have a Wallerian degeneration of the peripheral nerves with possibly axonal degeneration of the cells of the neuron involved.
Synonyms.—Neuritis Multiplex Endemica, Polyneuritis Endemica, Hydrops Asthmaticus. Japanese: Kakke.