Fat and blood : an essay on the treatment of certain forms of neurasthenia and hysteria / [S. Weir Mitchell].

  • Mitchell, S. Weir (Silas Weir), 1829-1914.
Date:
1902
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Fat and blood : an essay on the treatment of certain forms of neurasthenia and hysteria / [S. Weir Mitchell]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    and more sallow race, and, possibly, adapted us better to the region in which we live. The same changes in form are in like manner showing themselves in the English race in Australia.1 Some gain in flesh as life goes on is a frequent thing here as elsewhere, and usually has no un- wholesome meaning. Occasionally we see people past the age of sixty suddenly taking on fat and becoming at once unwieldy and feeble, the fat collecting in masses about the belly and around the joints. Such an increase is sometimes ac- companied with fatty degeneration of the heart and muscles, and with a certain watery flabbi- ness in the limbs, which, however, do not pit on pressure. Alcoholism also gives rise in some people to a vast increase of adipose tissue, and the sodden, unwholesome fatness of the hard drinker is a 1 This excess of corpulence in the English is attained chiefly after forty, as I have said. The average American is taller than the average Englishman, and is fully as well built in proportion to his height, as Gould has shown. The child of either sex in New England is both taller and heavier than the English child of corresponding class and age, as Dr. H. I. Bowditch has lately made clear; while the English of the manufacturing and agricultural classes are miserably inferior to the members of a similar class in America.