CEREBRAL LESIONS RESPONSIBLE FOR DEATH OF PATIENTS WITH ACTIVE RHEUMATIC FEVER

Abstract

IN SOME cases of severe rheumatism nervous symptoms are so prominent that the condition is called "cerebral rheumatism." In 1845 Hervez de Chégoin¹ described 3 cases of such a disease. These and similar observations were recorded by Trousseau,¹ Sydenham,² Girard,³ Leyden,⁴ Telgmann⁵ and other authors in the nineteenth century. In the great modern clinical treatises, the only cerebral complication of rheumatism mentioned is chorea; however, the old observations of the French clinicians have never been forgotten, and many monographs have since been published on cerebral rheumatism, among them those of Rosenthal and Joffe⁶; Hoppe⁷; Williams⁸; Coombs⁹; Toulouse, Marchand and Courtois¹⁰; Mørch-Christensen¹¹; Foster,¹² and Castex.¹³ Psychiatric observations on the encephalic complications of rheumatism have been published by Haskell,¹⁴ Dunlap,¹⁵ Bumke,¹⁶ Bleuler,¹⁷ Bouman,¹⁸ Bender,¹⁹ Froment and Brun²⁰ and Dublin.²¹ In