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free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: under the
prolonged use of Acidum fluoricum, that a long-worn wig could be put
off. This was observed by me while house-surgeon at the Hardman Street
Homoeopathic Dispensary in Liverpool; and it was there, too, that I
first had an opportunity of testing this remarkably bold assertion of Dr
Hughes, namely, that varicose veins would shrink to half their size
under the influence of fluoric acid. THE LAMP-LIGHTER S CASE OF
EXCESSIVE VARICOSITY OF THE LEFT INTERNAL SAPHENOUS VEIN. A middle-aged
man, by occupation a lamp-lighter, came under observation at the
Dispensary foran enormously dilated vein of the left thigh. At its
highest and largest end, just where it dips down to the femoral vein
through the sa- phenous opening of hafascia lata, it was as large as a
child's wrist; and near the knee, about the size of a man's little
finger, so that there was no inconsiderable danger of its rupturing and
causing dangerous haemorrhage. It was not the local expression of
general varicosis, but arose from a mechanical obstruction in this wise:
Patient had sowed his wild oats lang syne, and as part of the harvest
had reaped a big bubo in the left groin. This had sloughed, and been
burned with a strong acid, and there resulted as scar, a cicatricial
surface of the size of a man's palm, and this scar-tissue in contracting
had very much narrowed the entrance of the long saphenous vein, through
the opening of the fascia lata into the deeper- lying crural vein. Then,
in those days, lamp-lighters used to do their work with the aid of light
ladders, and were in the habit of sliding down them scores of times a
day, and thus the vein, that had become dilated from the lateral
pressure of the venous blood, coursing up the saphena, having such a
contracted entrance, became still more dist...
