Sodium phosphate, salicylic acid, salicylate of sodium, have all been used, it is claimed, with good results, and the late Dr. Dougherty of Newark, New Jersey, used with apparent advantage a mixture into which all of these, together with sodium carbonate, entered, made up with glycerin, tincture of cardamom, and water, the doses being 2½, 2½, 4½, and 8½ grains respectively. Moleschott has also obtained good results with salicylic acid.
SCROFULA.
BY JOHN S. LYNCH, M.D.
SYNONYMS.—Scrophula, Scrofulosis, Morbus scrophulosus, Struma, King's evil, The evil, Quince, Cruels and Crewels (Scotice).
DEFINITION.—A morbid condition of the system manifested by a peculiar liability to certain forms of nutritive disorders of the skin, mucous membranes, joints, bones, organs of special sense, and especially the lymphatic glands.
There is probably no disease of which it is more difficult to give an exact and satisfactory definition than scrofula. The general tendency of medical opinion within the last few decades has been to narrow the significance of the term, and even to restrict it to those slow and indolent inflammations and over-growths of lymphatic tissue which end in caseation and finally imperfect suppuration. Formerly almost every deviation from healthy functional activity in the young, as well as every disorder of nutrition which could not be assigned to any definite cause, was called struma; and thus, as Heule well remarks,1 "Scrofula became the receptacle into which one vaguely casts all the ailments which afflict children under fourteen years, and of which we do not know the cause."
1 Handbuch der Rationellen Pathologie.