suffocatio stridula. This disease has been particularly discriminated by modern authors. It is principally inimical to children, seldom until after ablactation; and never after the age of twelve, or of puberty at the utmost: it may attack the same child more than once: it is most frequent in winter and spring; and is not contagious nor general amongst the community. It commonly invades like a catarrh; and sometimes with its own permanent features, which are sudden paroxisms, as in spasmodic asthma, of laborious struggling respiration, and wheezing, as if the air-passage was straited; hoarseness, and shrill ringing sound, both in coughing and speaking, as if the voice came through a brass tube; cough, if any, dry, or with excreation of membranous fibres; thirst, quick pulse, anxiety, restlessness; and during the intervals, the senses and appetite are unimpaired: sometimes there is appearance, sometimes none, of inflammation in the fauces. It is always dangerous, infinitely more so than the preceding disease: death may suddenly ensue on the third, fourth, or fifth day, and perhaps when no such event was suspected: the impending hurricane may be prognosticated by laborious struggling in respiration, and symptoms of strangulation; with anxiety, restlessness, quick weak pulse.
The predisposing and occasional causes are yet the subject of litigation; whether inflammatory, or spasmodick, or a combination of both. On dissection, mucus accumulated has been found lining the larynx, by degrees incrassating, and interrupting the air from entering the lungs. We require same additional illumination on this subject.
A Miscellaneous cluster of diseases
are now to be developed. In the majority of these, however, some few general features of affinity may be traced: such as their affecting, directly or collaterally, the head, the brain, or its numerous diverging chords, the nerves; or the inherent muscular energy. But in many other circumstances of cause, diagnostick, prognostick, and therapeutick, they are disunited. And in every possible arrangement such defects are irremediable.
Headach.
No parts of the human organization are more prone to transitory interruption and disorder than the head and stomach: between the two there is a close connubial sympathy: to these two important centers many other maladies and remote perturbations converge, or reverberate their affliction. We here treat of headach as a primary disease; or at least as the principal symptom. From this calamity, in the extreme, the lives of many are rendered wretched. The London bills neither convey an adequate representation of cephalgick fatality, and far less of its general contentious torture of the human species. Headach has been subdivided by authors into the idiopathick, symptomatick, general, local, internal, external, chronic, periodic, and temporary; into cephalea, cephalalgia, hemicrania, clavus, megrim. In the seat, duration, recurrence, and pain, there are many varieties and gradations. Trespassing on the throne of sensation, it is evident the corporeal and mental functions must lament the subjugation.
The predisposing and occasional causes are, hereditary; sanguineous plethora; suppression of habitual hemorrhages, as menstrual, hemorrhoidal, nasal; perspiration checked; cold feet; cutaneous pores blocked up, and not sufficient perspiration; stomach foul, disordered; food or drink disagreeing; gluttony; ebriety; unwholesome quality of fermented or distilled liquors from accident or design; costiveness; violent exercise of body or mind, voice and lungs; immoderate determination of blood to the head from causes corporeal or mental; much stooping of the head; disagreeable passions and anxiety of mind, exasperating or depressing; study in excess; state of the winds and weather; of the points from whence winds blow; the variations in the barometer and electrometer; the muddiness and fogs of the atmosphere; cold; heat; foul air; crowded rooms, theatres, and other assemblages of mankind for amusement or business; offensive smells and vapours; fainting; inanition; excessive evacuations; intermittent; rheumatick; arthritick, hysterical; nervous; scorbutic; impure blood; cachexy; venereal; lunar; caries of the skull; diseases in the diploe; abscess, insects, or inflammation in the frontal, ethmoidal, or sphenoidal sinusses; first branch of the fifth pair of nerves particularly affected; carious teeth; various diseases within the brain; external injuries: symptomatick in fevers; hydrocephalus; and many other diseases besides those above enumerated.