Leucorrhea

“ Leucorrhea is one of the banes of the modern girl and woman. It is very frequent. Probably at least twenty-five per cent, (some say fifty or seventy-five per cent.) of all women suffer with it in a greater or lesser degree. In some cases it is only an annoyance, necessitating the frequent changing of napkins, but in others it causes a great deal of weakness, backache, erosions, itching and burning. ”

“ When a woman catches this disease, particularly from her husband, she is very likely to interpret the discharge as a leucorrhea, may say nothing about it to her husband or her physician, but adopt simple home treatment with antiseptic and astringent douches. ”

“ Leucorrhea is merely an abnormal increase of a normal secretion. All mucous membrane secretes mucus in small quantities—enough to keep the membrane moist. When from any cause this secretion is increased, we have what is called a catarrhal condition. As all cavities that communicate with the air are lined with mucous membrane, this catarrhal condition may exist in the nose, the throat, the eyes, the ears, the bowels, or the reproductive organs, and will be named according to the location. ”

“ If the Inflammation is Caused by Gonorrhea the discharge would partake of the pus-like variety.
Symptoms.—Local: is of course mainly the discharge or the irritation often produced by it, especially if it is thin. It then irritates the parts. The patient will be run down. It will be hard to do anything, frequently the patient is very nervous and irritable.
MOTHERS' REMEDIES. 1. Leucorrhea, Slippery Elm for.—"The immediate cause of leucorrhea is either congestion or inflammation of the mucous membrane of the vagina or womb, or both. ”

“ One kind of contagion [14] is more subtile than another; for there is a sort, which is taken into the body by the very breath; such as I have elsewhere said to exist in the plague, small pox, and other malignant fevers. But there is another sort, which infects by contact alone; either internal, as the venom of the venereal disease; or external, as that of the itch, which is conveyed into the body by rubbing against cloaths, whether woollen or linnen. Wherefore the leprosy, which is a species of the itch, may pass into a sound man in this last manner ”

“ The most important of these are anthrax, glanders, tuberculosis, infectious pleuro-pneumonia, swine plague, hog cholera, hog erysipelas, and fowl cholera. All of these have been proved to be due to bacterial parasites, the morphological and biological characters of which are now well known. The infectious agent and usual mode of infection being known in any given disease, we have a scientific basis for measures of prophylaxis. These naturally include the destruction of the specific micro-organism to which the disease is due wherever it may be found. ”

“ Their excrement contains large quantities of bacilli, which may be destructive to human beings. The rat-flea is also known to carry the infection. The infection may be conveyed directly by plague patients, when the buboes suppurate, or when the blood becomes generally infected with the bacilli pestis, which are contained in abundance in the sputum, urine, and excrement, or when the lungs are affected and the patient charges the atmosphere by coughing. One who has recovered from the disease is usually immune for life. ”

“ Now with regard to the infection of the cloaths, it has been found by most certain experiments, not only in the plague, and some other malignant eruptive fevers, as the small pox and measles, but even in the common itch; that the infection, once received into all sorts of furs or skins, woollen, linnen, and silk, remains a long time in them, and thence passes into human bodies. Wherefore it is easy to conceive, that the leprous miasmata might pass from such materials into the bodies of those, who either wore or handled them, and, like seeds sown, produce [22] the disease peculiar to them. ”

“ Definition.—Plague is primarily a disease of rats or other rodents and is caused by a bacterium of the haemorrhagic septicaemia group, Bacillus pestis. The disease exists in the rodent in both an acute and chronic form. Acute plague of the rat is apt to be septicaemic, so that when certain species of fleas which infest the rat feed on the blood of their host they ingest plague bacilli. These seem to multiply in the region of the proventriculus and cause thereby an obstruction to the stomach. As a result the flea makes vigorous and repeated but ineffectual efforts to feed. ”

“ In the present century we have to point to the establishment of the fact of the water-carriage of disease, with which the name of Snow is so honorably associated, the differentiation of continued fevers by Stewart and Jenner, and their connection with the poison of infected excreta by the labors of Budd and other eminent men. To those we must add the elaborate investigations into the modes of propagation of cholera, dysentery, and other tropical diseases, and the means by which scarlet fever, diphtheria, etc., are carried from place to place by various channels of communication. ”

“ Mistakes can scarcely be made unless from carelessness, or by someone completely ignorant of the nature, history, and symptoms of these diseases.
In approaching the diagnosis of skin eruptions, localized pareses, muscular atrophies, and anæsthesia in patients living in or coming from a country in which leprosy is endemic, the possibility of their being attributable to this disease must be borne in mind. If doubt exist, and it be found feasible, search for the bacillus should be made in eruptions, or in thickened nerves, or in any nasal or other morbid discharge that may be present. ”

“ The worms which inhabit the intestines have a sharp biting mouth by which they fasten themselves to the mucous membrane and devour the blood. The most prominent symptom of the disease is anæmia, or loss of blood, due not only to the direct eating of the parasite, but to bleeding from the small wounds caused by its bite. Large numbers of eggs are produced by the parasite which are passed out with the feces, which becomes the only infectious material. In a city provided with water-closets and a system of sewerage there would be no means of extension of infection. ”

“ In no cases is it more useful than in secretive irregularities, such as in leucorrhœa, gonorrhœa, or syphilitic ulceration. Without further comment, these diseases will be considered.
GONORRHŒA IN THE FEMALE.
This disease is rarely so violent as in man, it being mostly confined to the uterine conduit; in fact, except by the discharge, women are almost unconscious of its existence, mistaking it, when occurring in married life, for leucorrhœa. Occasionally, however, the inflammation is highly acute, and a variety of distressing symptoms ensue. ”

“ The fact that plague can be communicated to the lower animals by feeding them on the tissues of plague patients and on cultures of the specific bacillus, suggests that the disease may be conveyed to man in food or drink. The bacillus is sometimes found in the intestinal contents of patients. It is also to be found in the urine. Water or food contaminated with sewage or fæcal matter may therefore be regarded as a possible medium of infection. Food contaminated by infected rats is likely also to be a source of danger. ”

“ In this case no injury had occurred, and therefore the parent worm had not aborted and blocked the parts. Filarial infection might be present without the patient or physician knowing it. It might show itself as a tumour or an abscess in any organ of the body, or in a hydrocele, or in chyluria, or in enlarged glands. He remembered visiting a man who had swollen glands in the groin, a plague tongue, with a high temperature, and who was delirious ; there was plague in the house. The man was sent to the plague hospital, where he passed urine which was examined under the miscroscope. ”

“ From specific germs that may be carried in sewage at any time there may result typhoid fever, tuberculosis, cholera, dysentery, diarrhea, and other dangerous ailments, and it is probable that other maladies may be traced to human waste. From certain animal parasites or their eggs that may be carried in sewage there may result intestinal worms, of which the more common are the hookworm, roundworm, whipworm, eelworm, tapeworm, and seat worm. ”

“ That the habitat of the infecting germ is man is rendered in the highest degree probable by the fact that the germ is found in the human tissues and, hitherto, nowhere else; and by the fact that leprosy has never been known to appear on virgin soil independently of the prior advent of a leper. When a leper settles down in virgin country, after a time cases of the disease crop up among his companions and immediate neighbours. Some of these newly-made lepers, proceeding to a different part of the country, in time become centres for other groups of cases. ”

“ Other Insects which carry Disease.—In certain parts of Africa, the sleeping sickness has made ruins of prosperous villages. Thousands of the natives are dying yearly from this disease. The germs are carried from one person to another by the bite of a fly.
Some fleas carry the germs of plague, which a few centuries ago swept across Asia and Europe destroying hundreds of lives daily. The plague is now common in India and was present in California in 1908 and 1910. The bedbug spreads several kinds of fevers in warm countries and may also be a carrier of leprosy and typhoid fever. ”

“ To this opinion, I object the uncertainty of worms ever producing an idiopathic fever, and the improbability of their combining in such a manner as to produce an annual epidemic disease of any kind. But further, we often see the disease in all its force, before that age, in which worms usually produce diseases; we likewise often see it resist the most [159] powerful anthelmintic medicines; and, lastly, it appears from dissection, where the disease has proved fatal, that not a single worm has been discovered in the bowels. ”

“ The other organs are less freely invaded. The bacilli excite inflammation, and by a specific action transform the migrating cell into the leprous cell. Leprosy is probably an infectious disease, and its specific products are contagious—viz. the leprous cells of the tubercles, the tissue-fluids, and the pus containing bacilli or viable spores. On the other hand, the pus may not always be infectious, as the fluid contained in the bullæ is not. ”

“ The number of eruptions varies greatly in different cases. Sometimes the patient has, for several years, several eruptions every year; in other cases the eruptions appear only very rarely—one or two in the whole course of the disease, and they may be very slight. It appears as if the bacilli in different cases were of varying virulence, or possibly the structural conditions are different in different individuals, so that in some the bacilli (or the poison) reach the blood more easily than in others. ”

“ The water-supply is to be suspected in case of prevalence of diarrhoeal disease in a community, and especially if the outbreak be sudden and affect a number of persons and families. Sudden outbreaks of cholera, typhoid fever, or malarial fever, confined to a limited locality, should lead to careful examination of the water-supply. The impurity in water which causes these diseases is supposed to be either organic or the product of organic life, and at present the prevailing opinion is that the really dangerous impurities consist of minute living organisms or [p. 183] germs. ”

“ Nor are the disease-bearing possibilities of the house fly limited to intestinal germ diseases. There is strong circumstantial evidence that tuberculosis, anthrax, yaws, ophthalmia, smallpox, tropical sore, and parasitic worms may be and are so carried. Actual laboratory proof exists in the cases of a number of these diseases, and where lacking is replaced by circumstantial evidence amounting almost to certainty. ”

“ Source of Infection. Clinical observation and analogy point to unfiltered drinking water as the source of infection.
Position of the Parasite. The worms are found in the veins of the abdomen, the vena porta, vena linealis, vena renalis, and the venous plexus of the bladder and of the rectum.
Symptoms. The young parasites appear to do no injury; in fact, even the adult worms seem to be inoffensive in themselves. The eggs, on the other hand, armed with a sharp point, are the exciting cause of the disease. ”

“ Thus it becomes probable that the human organism is endangered by a certain number of the putrefaction microphytes. Some one may have a particular predilection for granulating wounds and mucous membranes, and thereby produce a diphtheritic inflammation. Another may enter the blood from a recent wound and give rise to a septicæmic fever with rapidly fatal termination. The third may invade the body by means of a phlegmonous inflammation, purulent infiltration, thrombosis, embolism, and metastatic abscesses, accompanied with a pyæmic fever of a remittent type. ”

“ Loathsome contagious diseases include those whose presence excites abhorrence in others, and which are essentially chronic, such as favus, ringworm of the scalp, parasitic fungus diseases, Madura foot, leprosy and venereal disease. Dangerous contagious diseases are such as trachoma, filariasis, hookworm infection, amœbic dysentery, and endemic hematuria. ”

“ The fact, however, that the organism may remain alive in water is of great importance; and, as in the case of cholera, it must be recognized that certain of the great epidemics of typhoid or enteric fever have been the result of " water-borne infection." The bacillus, a facultative parasite, grows outside the body, with somewhat characteristic appearances and reactions: it flourishes specially well on a slightly acid medium ”