CHAPTER XXIV
IRREGULAR GOUT
“It is not a sacred disease. There will therefore be no profaneness in handling it freely,” affirmed Benjamin Rush of gout some hundred years since.
Nevertheless one approaches with diffidence this debatable ground, so hedged in by high sanction and tradition. Albeit reverence for authority must, in the interests of progress, be tempered by that spirit of inquiring scepticism which would sift the chaff from the grain, this the more emphatically in that of all morbid conditions “irregular” gout, by the very vagueness of its clinical content, lends itself the more easily to unbridled inference, hazardous conjecture, and fanciful surmise.
As for the unlicensed freedom too often exercised in relegating disorders to this category, Rush would appear to have out-heroded Herod, pace the following rhetorical reflections, for they could scarcely rank as clinical observations. “The great toe and the joints of the hands and feet are no more its exclusive seats,” said Rush, “than the stomach is the throne of yellow fever. In short, gout may be compared to a monarch whose empire is unlimited. The whole body crouches before it.... The gout affects the glands and lymphatics. It produced a salivation of a profuse nature in Major Pearce Buller, which continued for two days. It produced a bubo in the groin in a citizen of Philadelphia. He had never been infected with the venereal disease. Of course no suspicion was entertained by me of its being derived from that cause.... Scrofula and all the forms of dropsy are the effects in many cases of a disposition of the gout to attack the lymphatic system.... A distressing collection of air in the rectum, which renders frequent retirement from company necessary to discharge it, is likewise a symptom of gout.”
It is difficult to conceive that any such pronouncement could have emanated from a physician of Rush’s standing and repute, a contemporary, be it noted, of Heberden, to whose masterly commentaries on the history and cure of gout all posterity is indebted. Nevertheless as recently as 1854 Sir Spencer Wells claimed that “any attempt to describe the nervous diseases of females caused by gout would lead to an enumeration of almost all forms of their diseases, especially those usually considered as hysteric. The intestinal derangements with tympanitis, neuralgia, or colic, the hysteric pain in the right epigastrium, the cardialgia and gastrodynia, the hysteric vomiting and epigastric spasms, the morbid sensibility of the pharynx and fauces, hysterical palpitation, asthma or bronchitis, loss or alteration of the voice, some forms of hysteric paraplegia or hemiplegia more or less complete, chorea or tetanus, some of the curious paroxysmal affections observed in hysteria, and all the varieties of neuralgia and simulated inflammation, commonly called hysteric, frequently arise from the presence in the blood of the impurities which are the true characteristics of gout.”[43]
Truly, in light of this heavy indictment, one scarcely wonders that Rush classed the domain of gout as limitless. But one must recollect that, nosologically speaking, our forefathers were sadly hampered. Anomalous symptoms and disorders had to be referred to one or other of the available titles of disease, and what term more elastic than the timeworn “gout,” so easy to saddle with vicarious responsibilities?
But pari passu with advancing knowledge of the pathology of the nervous system and the rise of hysteria to the status of a clinical entity gout was shorn of the excrescences heaped on it by Laycock, Wells, and others.
But nevertheless the emancipation of gout from nervous and other alien disorders was slow of achievement, and largely, I think, through the wide acceptation of Murchison’s theory of a pathological state allied to gout and termed by him “lithæmia,” or the “uric acid diathesis.”
According to this authority, the deposit of lithates in the urine is a “manifestation of a morbid condition of the blood and of the entire system,” the outcome of a functional derangement of the liver. Such hepatic disturbance might endure for years without manifesting any other symptom than a frequent deposition of urates and occasionally uric acid in the urine. But, added Murchison, the same if neglected “may ultimately be the means of developing gout.”