Liver cirrhosis

In a footnote to his erotically charged botanical poem The Loves of the Plants (1791), Erasmus Darwin, Enlightenment freethinker and Charles Darwin's grandfather, offered his own eccentric take on the myth of Prometheus as a metaphor for the effect of hard drink on the liver: “The swallowing of drams cannot be better represented in hieroglyphic language than by taking fire into one's bosom; and certain it is, that the general effect of drinking spirituous liquors is an inflamed, schirrous, or paralytic liver“. Two major themes in the history of medicine have shaped our understanding of cirrhosis (from a Greek conjunction meaning yellowish disease): a long story of cultural, political, and clinical attitudes towards alcohol consumption, and an almost equally fractious set of debates over the function of the liver. The historian will see you now: introducing Case Histories“I hope that Lord Grey and you are well”, wrote the Regency wit and clergyman Sydney Smith to his confidante Lady Mary Grey in February, 1836, “no easy thing, seeing that there are about fifteen hundred diseases to which man is subject”. Last year the editors of the Lancet journals announced the launch of The Lancet Clinic, a major online initiative which draws together an overview Seminar with the best current research from across the Lancet journals on 135 of the most globally important diseases. Full-Text PDF GoutAs he tried to evoke the agonies of his gout-stricken patients in the first century CE, the Greek physician Aretaeus of Cappadocia did not mince his words: “No other pain is more severe than this, not iron screws, nor cords, nor the wound of a dagger, nor burning fire.” Like osteoarthritis, like dental caries, gout is one of many chronic diseases that, in the words of the historians Roy Porter and George Rousseau, “are not in themselves fatal, but incurable, typically debilitating, sometimes crippling and inordinately painful”. Full-Text PDF Laennec's cirrhosisThe case history of cirrhosis published in The Lancet (July 28, 2018, p 275)1 should have mentioned three key contributors to the understanding of cirrhosis. Full-Text PDF