Henry Baird Favill, AB, MD, LL.D., 1860-1916, a ... - University Library

MEDICINE AND PUBLIC HEALTH 109
nature of the toxic
substances to which one so frequently
refers. However, every rational analysis, every analogy,
lends color to the assumption that the blood is the means
of distribution, in addition to its normal constituents, of
extraneous or accumulated agents which are, broadly
speaking, toxic.
Most obvious of these circulatory^ distributions are the
systemic poisonings occurring in the course of septic disease.
It is at this day superfluous to argue the toxic quality of
blood so impregnated. The destructive effect upon tissue
is too familiar for comment. And yet these are but the
acute and exaggerated prototypes after which follow
innumerable less pronounced intoxications whose clinical
manifestations have until recently borne the names of individual
diseases.
There must be dissected and rearranged all
of the complex
subjects included under various asthmas and rheumatisms,
bronchitides and headaches, dyspepsias and diarrhoeas—
each with its many sides, and all susceptible of
more or less correlation.
As a text for my remarks I wish to state simply the facts
in a case selected from many of similar import, because of
its greater variety of morbid phenomena.
A young woman of thirty years of age, whose health
had never been excellent, had had since childhood a cough,
in character loose, accompanied at times by profuse expectoration.
At twenty-five years, she fell into so-called
nervous prostration and in the course of it developed what
has been called asthma, which was for a time, and has been
at periods since,
very obstinate.
In addition to this, and in behavior quite different,
she has periods of great dyspnoea, accompanied by cold
extremities, great prostration, and always associated with
gas in the stomach or bowels.
About the period of the development of the asthma, she
began to have what was regarded as rheumatism of knees