Paperback: 460 pages
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (March 27, 2014)Language: English
ISBN-10: 1108068936
Reissued here together are two medical works, both published in 1835, by
John Grant Malcolmson (1803-44), a British surgeon based in India. His
extended essays explore the symptoms, diagnosis and treatment of
beriberi and rheumatism, conditions which were widespread in Asia at the
time. Also describing the contrasting effects that the illnesses had on
India's native population and on European colonials, Malcolmson draws
on his first-hand experience to speculate on the underlying causes. His
analysis of beriberi, forming the larger of the two components here,
discusses a disease which had perplexed doctors in the early nineteenth
century. Beginning with numbness and spasms in the legs, and eventually
rendering the patient completely bedridden, beriberi was frequently
fatal, and physicians frequently confused it with other rheumatic
disorders. It is now known to be caused by a deficiency of thiamine
(vitamin B1).
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