Page:Transactions of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association, volume 2.djvu/235



Upon the whole, the average of life is very high in the clay districts, but I have been unable to make any thing like a correct calculation of the comparative mortality between the wheat-land and the rye-land districts, on account of the population being insufficient for the purpose, and of the constant emigration which takes place from the distant parishes to the neighbouring towns.

It may, perhaps, be expected that I should give a more particular account of some of the severer forms of disease which occasionally occur in this neighbourhood, though I have nothing in addition to offer as to their treatment, to what is well known to every respectable practitioner.

Acute rheumatism is one of the most severe diseases which we meet with, whether we look to the immediate suffering of individuals, or to its future consequences. I am not aware that it is more frequent among watermen than among those persons who are less exposed to wet and cold, and at least one-half of my patients have been young women. Nor are those persons who are exposed to great changes of temperature in foundries and forges, more liable to rheumatism. I do not, at present, recollect a single case of acute rheumatism among them. I am inclined to think that gout and rheumatism are more nearly allied than is generally supposed, and that both depend very much upon hereditary predisposition. Since the more general introduction of colchicum into practice, rheumatism is much more easily cured than it formerly was. In my own practice, I seldom find it necessary to take away blood. I generally depend upon the