Heart and blood

RACE WITH DEATH

Mary was a child of seven or eight. Martin found her lips and fingers blue and fingers blue and her face pale. From time to time she made an effort to breathe deeply and coughed up saliva with gratis specks. Martin worried as he took out his clinical thermometer and shook it.

Martin had to make a decision. He had to get diphtheria antitoxin from the nearby town. He asked the child’s father to phone the chemist’s at Leopolis.
Martin waited looking worriedly at the child. The child’s hoarse breathing becomes terrible. Should he operate: out into wind – pipe that she might breather? He had to do something.
“Get some hot clothes – towels, napkins and keep them around her neck”, Martin said to the child’s mother.
At that moment the child’s father appeared telling that there was nobody at the chemist’s at Leopolis.
He drove the twenty-four miles to Leopolis in thirty seven minutes. The speed and the cool air calmed him a little. In his mind all the while was the page Osier regarding diphtheria, “In severe cases the first dose should be from 10.000 to 15.000 unites”. He regained confidence and thanked the medical science for antitoxin. It was, he decided, a Race with Death.
The child was still alive when he returned and come quickly into the house. He made intravenous injection of the antitoxin and stood waiting.

Botkin’s Disease

Botkin’s disease, or the so-called epidemic or infectious hepatitis, is an acute viral disease affecting hepatic cells and bile ducts. The prominent German scientist Virchow believing it to be due to obstruction of the common bile duct with mucus during inflammatory processes in the duodenum, the disease was called catarrhal jaundice. But in 1880 the prominent Russian scientist S. Botkin having advanced the idea of an in factious of this disease, proved his suggestions by such facts as the involvement in this pathologic process of not only liver but also of the nervous system, the kidneys, the enlargement of the spleen, etc. But it was not before 1940 that the term “Botkin’s disease” was introduced into medicine due to the efforts of the well-known Soviet physician M. Konchalovsky. Botkin’s disease occurs in epidemic form. It more commonly affects children, though this disease is frequent in adults as well as in elderly persons.

Botkin’s disease is known to be due to a filterable virus present in the blood, liver and found in stool and urine. The virus is infective only for man. This virus being not seen under a usual microscope, it may be discovered only by an electronic one. This filterable virus being highly infective, it survives in winter, food, and on hands for days and weeks.