ABSTRACT
In 1845 James L. Bardsley, a prominent British physician, wrote that diabetes "has been traced by some patients to sleeping out the whole of the night in a state of intoxication". In same year that Bardsley wrote about diabetes, Wilhelm Friedrich Scanzoni, director of the Prague maternity clinic, proposed to study the etiology of childbed fever, an often fatal disease that struck women a day or two after child birth. One widely used British medical encyclopedia identified anxiety as a possible cause of dozens of diseases including acne, catalepsy, diabetes, ecthyma, fever, herpes, hydrocephalus, impetigo, senile dementia, psoriasis, scrofula, and tetanus. In nineteenth century, phthisis, a prominent disease at the time, was characterized as coughing so intensely that it involved spitting up blood—a condition that, like most other disordered states, could be caused in many different ways. However, anatomical studies revealed that these physical conditions were often associated with distinctive caseating tumors or tubers in the lungs—a condition called tuberculosis.
