Observations on morbid poisons, chronic and acute : the first compehending syphilis, yaws, sivvens, elephantiasis, and the anomala confounded with them ; the second the acute contagions, particularly the variolous & vaccine / by Joseph Adams.

  • Adams, Joseph, 1756-1818.
Date:
1807
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Observations on morbid poisons, chronic and acute : the first compehending syphilis, yaws, sivvens, elephantiasis, and the anomala confounded with them ; the second the acute contagions, particularly the variolous & vaccine / by Joseph Adams. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    abdomen, and adds., that their descent is about the time of birth, when he conceives they are somewhere about the ring of the external oblique muscle, and by the breathing and crying of the child, and the action of the abdominal muscles, are forced into the scrotum. Mr. Pott, who wrote a year or two afterwards, describes the fact pretty much in the same manner. Haller afterwards, in his Primes Linecs * of 1764, from which the Edinburgh edition is printed, ascribes their descent to increased weight from the blood rushing into them. Either of these hypotheses might be supported by syl- logism. To prove the latter it may fairly be urged, that the weight of the testicle is increased by the increased quantity of blood it receives from the new course of circulation, which respiration pro- duces ; that by the well-known laws of gravitation, all bodies move to the centre or downward, in proportion to their weight, and that from the erect posture of the human body, the scrotum is lower than the abdomen. Hence the cause of the phenomenon. In favour of the other opinion, it might be urged, that such are the consequences of pressure on the contents of the abdomen, that when violent, even in the adult, it will frequently cause a protrusion of the intestines through apertures before not discoverable. That respiration and the new action of the abdominal muscles must be violent in proportion as the parts are unaccustomed to such a pres- sure ; and that when a child cries, which it usually does, and is very likely to do, from the peculiar situation of so sensible a part as the testicle, this pressure is very much increased. Hence the solution of the difficulty. But it is impossible it should escape Haller, that the gravitating cause might be prevented by the boy being kept so continually in an horizontal positron as infants usually are; or Mr. Pott, that if the process depended at all on the action of the abdominal muscles, * Denique sub inguine in plena xtate ponuntur, situ mutato, vi forte sanguinis irruen- tis.—Prim. Lin. 807.