MISCELLANEOUS SURGICAL ANOMALIES. 12 page

widely-spread parasite in parts of Africa and the West Indies.

According to Osler several cases have occurred in the United States.

Jarvis reports a case in a post-chaplain who had lived at Fortress

Monroe, Va., for thirty years. Van Harlingen's patient, a man of

forty-seven, had never lived out of Philadelphia, so that the worm must

be included among the parasites infesting this country.

In February, 1896, Henry of Philadelphia showed microscopic slides

containing blood which was infested with numbers of living and active

filaria embryos. The blood was taken from a colored woman at the

Woman's Hospital, who developed hematochyluria after labor. Henry

believed that the woman had contracted the disease during her residence

in the Southern States.

Curran gives quite an exhaustive article on the disease called in olden

times "eaten of worms,"--a most loathsome malady. Herod the Great, the

Emperor Galerius, and Philip II of Spain perished from it. In speaking

of the Emperor Galerius, Dean Milman, in his "History of Latin

Christianity," says, "a deep and fetid ulcer preyed on the lower parts

of his body and ate them away into a mass of living corruption."

Gibbon, in his "Decline and Fall," also says that "his (Galerius's)

death was caused by a very painful and lingering disorder. His body,

swelled by an intemperate course of life to an unwieldy corpulence, was

covered with ulcers and devoured by immense swarms of those insects who

have given their names to this most loathsome disease." It is also said

that the African Vandal King, the Arian Huneric, died of the disease.

Antiochus, surnamed the "Madman," was also afflicted with it; and

Josephus makes mention of it as afflicting the body of Herod the Great.

The so-called "King Pym" died of this "morbus pedicularis," but as

prejudice and passion militated against him during his life and after

his death, this fact is probably more rumor than verity. A case is

spoken of by Curran, which was seen by an army-surgeon in a very aged

woman in the remote parts of Ireland, and another in a female in a

dissecting-room in Dublin. The tissues were permeated with lice which

emerged through rents and fissures in the body.

Instances of the larvae of the estrus or the bot-fly in the skin are

not uncommon. In this country Allen removed such larvae from the skin

of the neck, head, and arm of a boy of twelve. Bethune, Delavigne,

Howship, Jacobs, Jannuzzi and others, report similar cases. These

flesh-flies are called creophilae, and the condition they produce is

called myiosis. According to Osler, in parts of Central America, the

eggs of a bot-fly, called the dermatobia, are not infrequently

deposited in the skin, and produce a swelling very like the ordinary

boil. Matas has described a case in which the estrus larvae were found

in the gluteal region. Finlayson of Glasgow has recently reported an

interesting case in a physician who, after protracted constipation and

pain in the back and sides, passed large numbers of the larvae of the

flower-fly, anthomyia canicularis, and there are other instances of

myiosis interna from swallowing the larvae of the common house-fly.

There are forms of nasal disorder caused by larvae, which some native

surgeons in India regard as a chronic and malignant ulceration of the

mucous membranes of the nose and adjacent sinuses in the debilitated

and the scrofulous. Worms lodging in the cribriform plate of the

ethmoid feed on the soft tissues of that region. Eventually their

ravages destroy the olfactory nerves, with subsequent loss of the sense

of smell, and they finally eat away the bridge of the nose. The head of

the victim droops, and he complains of crawling of worms in the

interior of the nose. The eyelids swell so that the patient cannot see,

and a deformity arises which exceeds that produced by syphilis. Lyons

says that it is one of the most loathsome diseases that comes under the

observation of medical men. He describes the disease as "essentially a

scrofulous inflammation of the Schneiderian membrane, ... which finally

attacks the bones." Flies deposit their ova in the nasal discharges,

and from their infection maggots eventually arise. In Sanskrit peenash

signifies disease of the nose, and is the Indian term for the disease

caused by the deposition of larvae in the nose. It is supposed to be

more common in South America than in India.

CHAPTER XVI.

Date: 2014-12-29; view: 674