Page:Transactions of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association, volume 4.djvu/288

 186 in malarious districts than elsewhere, that I should have predicated of the Landsend district a comparative immunity from them. The fact, however, is by no means such as regards Penzance and its immediate neighbourhood, as is shewn by the Dispensary table; and the same results are afforded by my inquiries among the resident practitioners in Penzance. One of these had met with several cases of chronic hepatitis which proved fatal by suppuration, and some others in which recovery had taken place on the abscess being discharged externally. Several of the practitioners in the country to the eastward of Penzance, considered the disease as very rare, meeting with no more than a single case in seven or eight years, during a long practice. Judging from my own limited experience, and the results of the Penzance table, I should say that organic affections of the liver were of moderate frequency in the district.

Jaundice.—This disease, which the Dispensary tables shew to have been comparatively infrequent at Penzance, at least much less so than hepatitis and scirrhous liver, was regarded as of frequent occurrence by the same country practitioners who reported liver cases as rare. Several of them who had only met with two or three cases of diseased liver in seven or eight years, met with as many cases of jaundice annually. Some of the older practitioners also considered the disease as rarer now than in their early practice. They noticed a fact, which most practitioners must have observed of this and of many other diseases, that it had a tendency to run in families: some had met with three cases in one family.