The hip and its diseases / by V.P. Gibney.

  • Gibney, V. P. (Virgil Pendleton), 1847-1927.
Date:
1884,©1883
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The hip and its diseases / by V.P. Gibney. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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    .matism among the diseases of the hip. All of us are taug.ht to look with a deep sense of pity on a man who calls a ** hip-disease rheumatism, and we begin to think that this is one of the errors of the dark ages. My sense of pity is not so acute as it formerly was, and I have reached the conclusion from cases in actual practice that subacute and chronic rheumatism, both of the muscular and the arthritic varieties, do exist in the monarticular form in children. I have incorporated several cases that seem to me conclusive. In districts where damp weather prevails and where malaria abounds there are many cases of this nature; and while some clinical lecturer may occasion- ally find a child at his clinic in whom rheumatism has been diagnosticated where a true bone disease exists, there are many more in whom such a diagnosis has been made that do not come to the clinic. Still, this is a not uncommon error, and a chapter on the subject will serve to bring out the points in diagnosis all the more sharply. On the subject of chronic rheumatic arthritis^-the malum coxae senile of some authors—I fear I have not been suffi- ciently explicit. Many of these cases I have had an oppor- tunity of examining, and have made myself familiar with their clinical history; but I have not had the treatment of the same, because the hospital with which I am connected is exclusively for children. Still, from a study of a few that I have seen under treatment and reported in current literature, I have aimed to set forth principles in treatment that I feel convinced will lead to good results. These are a very unfortunate class of sufferers, and the lesion once being recognized, free passive motion of the joint under an anaesthetic sometimes affords decided relief. While the term periarthritis, as originally employed, desig- nated a subacute or chronic lesion limited to the fibrous structure in close proximity to the joint, I have found it very useful to designate by this term an acute cellulitis a little more remote from the joint, yet by contiguity often involving structures more closely related. This periarticular cellu- litis, then, I have been in the habit of calling a coxo-femo- ral periarthritis. The name seems to me a good one, and I cannot at present recall the name of the author to whom we are indebted for its introduction into our nosology. It is nearly always acute, and nearly always terminates without seriously impairing the joint functions. It is a comparatively