Polypi of the Heart, internal Aneurism, and Ossification.
Polypi are solid coagulums of blood, of a firm or fleshy consistence: aneurism a distention and weakness in some portion of the arterial coats, and partial enlargement or bulge in the sanguineous canal; the usual seat of the first is in the auricles and ventricles; of the second, in the large trunks, and more about their origin: ossification of the valves, and of the aorta, or the smaller branches, is more frequent in old age. The symptoms of polypi and aneurism are often ambiguous; most of them are common to some other diseases; such as difficulty of breathing, violent palpitation of the heart, and anxiety aggravated by the least motion, with propensity to faint, intermittent pulse, pain under the sternum, torpor of the arm, pale face, edematous ancles, frightful dreams, timidity to walk alone without support. These, together with syncope and asphyxy, no doubt make a part of the sudden deaths, and some other casualties in the London bills.
I had nearly omitted the description of two diseases in which we are not personally interested; the Berbiers of Indostan, and the Raphania, once a European meteor. In the berbiers there is chronic tremulous motion of the hands and feet, sometimes of the whole body: at the same time pricking and formication, and some degree of insensibility; weakened voice; anhelation: it usually originates from suppressed perspiration. The raphania was once a transient epidemick, and principally noxious to infants; the symptoms stupor of the spine, sensation of pricking pain in the muscular fibres; the lower extremities rigid, sometimes convulsed; eyes rigid and distorted; pharynx constricted; tongue retracted.
Hypochondriasm,
hips, spleen, and vapours, imaginary maladies. This chronic valetudinary infatuation is very frequent in our island: it occurs principally in the adult and middle age; seldom early in life; in the male more than in the female sex, especially in those of melancholick temperaments; and much more amongst persons of independent fortunes, and amongst literary and sedentary professions, than the exercised and industrious. Vapours are often complicated with diseases of the stomach, hystericks, melancholy. But in the true hypochondriasm, the valetudinary dyspepsy, and diseases of the digestive organs, seem rather a natural consequence and sequel of the lugubrious mental temperament: besides, in dyspepsy the mental perturbation is slight; it is also a far more universal disease than hypochondriasm, affecting equally both sexes; and the young as well as the old.
Hypochondriacks feel, or imagine they feel, all diseases; against these they combat with a thousand remedies, and exhaust the whole pharmaceutical rotine. They exaggerate with minute narrative these morbid phantoms, which no other person can perceive, nor account for; examining their pulse, fatiguing and harassing their physicians, visitors, and domesticks; on the slightest grounds haunted with apprehensive forebodings of misfortunes, misery, and death; and in the utmost anxiety about the event, at the time perhaps that the appetite is not much impaired: in most things, however, their judgment is correct; their health and diseases excepted, which are the constant objects of their fears.
By such anxious solicitude, and passive submission to fanciful and imperative chimeras, a luxuriant brood of symptoms, like irregular hysteria, are engendered: they at length convert, or at least aggravate, accelerate, and multiply imaginary into real evils, deranging the complicated offices of digestion and circulation: hence flatulence, eructation, indigestion, nausea, acid bilious vomiting, exspuition of watery fluid, irregular appetite; profuse, irregular excretions and secretions by urine, perspiration, saliva, mucus, diarrhœa, or its reverse costiveness; with palpitation of the heart, flushing of heat and cold, fugacious spasms, anhelation; obscure vision, vertigo, noise in the ears, headach, disturbed sleep, frightful dreams; slothfulness, pusillanimity, want of resolution and activity, disposition to seriousness and sadness, shyness, suspicion, peevishness, moroseness: the mind often dejected and in despair, so as not to be solaced with hopes of relief. It sometimes ceases, or at least abates weeks and months, recurring in periodical exacerbations on any exciting cause or mental distress, intemperance, or vicissitudes and irregularity of the seasons. Costiveness and hardened feces indicate the obstinacy of the disease. It is not immediately dangerous to life; but when of inveterate continuance, may terminate in insanity, cachexy, jaundice, dropsy, tympany, consumption.
The predisposing and occasional causes are morbid extreme of sensibility; hereditary; various depressing passions of mind; studious sedentary life and abstruse meditation; retirement to an inactive after a bustling busy life; excess of venery, manustupration; wealth, indolence, transient, unsatisfactory amusements; revelling in pleasures, and cloyed with satiety; November fogs, easterly winds, sirocco winds; intemperance in food or drink, suppression of usual and solitary evacuations, as menses, hemorrhoids; repulsion of cutaneous eruptions; obstruction in the circulation through the vena porta and liver, and in the biliary secretion; obstruction in the abdominal viscera; debility in the stomach and intestines, and consequently vitiated chyle; pituita in excess; worms; irregular gout; hystericks; intermittent fever.