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Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/371

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BLOODY SWEAT.
357

power and influence that are in their hands on the side of the inferior type; they are both, so far as they can do it, preventing the development of the better type. They are both manufacturing virtues which are the mere imitations of virtues, sham products that, as time will tell them, will neither wash nor wear. Many men before them have tried a fall with Nature and her conditions, and have scarcely had the best of it. Nature in her irony often allows us a ten minutes of seeming success when we go against her methods, and I doubt not that both Sir W. Lawson and Mr. Mundella will have a ten minutes of their own; but then comes the after-time in which the bent bow flies back. I hope as it does so it may not hit any of my friends too violently in the face who have been so strenuously bending it down.

BLOODY SWEAT.

By J. H. POOLEY, M. D.,

PROFESSOR OF SURGERY IN THE TOLEDO MEDICAL COLLEGE, TOLEDO, OHIO.

THIS rare affection, which has always excited in a high degree the interest and attention of medical observers, consists essentially of a hæmorrhage from the unbroken surface of the skin. But, inasmuch as it takes place from the network of small vessels which surround the sweat-glands, and makes it appearance through the opening of the sweat-ducts, it is not inappropriately, after all, named "bloody sweat."

The discharge is generally intermittent, or at least remittent, and paroxysmal in its nature, the intervals varying from a few hours to months. Sometimes it is pure blood which coagulates in crusts or gouts upon the surface, sometimes it is so intermixed with serum or the perspiratory fluid as to be merely a more or less deeply colored bloody liquid.

Its extent varies extremely: it may make its appearance over the whole or nearly the whole of the surface of the body, but more commonly it is confined to some selected regions, generally those in which the skin is thin and delicate. It most frequently appears as a more or less copious and continued oozing from the surface, which, when wiped away, rapidly or slowly reappears from numerous minute or indistinguishable points, but it has been seen to spring up in a distinct jet from the surface.

It is often associated with eruptions upon the skin, but quite as often there is nothing of the kind. Every age and both sexes have furnished examples of it, though it is most common in females, and especially in nervous and hysterical women. Bloody sweat may be pro-