Volume 49 · Issue 10 · 1935

Knowing the high incidence of cases of beriberi in the city of Foochow, inquiry was made of nine other cities in Fukien by sending a short questionnaire to +he mission hospital in each city. With one, exception all reported, (a) that the people as a whole do not have beri-beri: (b) that the only cases seen are among soldiers with an occasional student from various educational institutions: (c) that very little highly poIished rice is used and even in cities where there are motor rice polishing machines, the use of the very white rice is not great.

There are many non-tuberculous diseases of the lungs which simulate Pulmonary Tuberculosis; some of these may, with due care be easily differentiated whilst the others may require prolonged investigations for their correct diagnosis. Of these lung conditions, perhaps the more important correct diagnosis.

There are many diseases in Shanghai carrying attractive names which mean nothing, such as Yangtze-Fever, Shanghai-Fever, Thirteen and a half days Fever, and so on.

Traumatic injuries of the kidney have often been reported in foreign literature. Connell (1) in 1910 found 841 cases from a rather extensive review of literature. Bugbee (2) in 1916 reported over 1,100 cases of trauma of the kidney and the ureter with his personal collection of 8 cases. Fullerton (3) noted 42 cases of renal injuries from gun-shot wounds in 1917 and Duglee and Harrah (4) reported 11 cases of ruptured kidney several years ago. Keller (5) found 43 cases of renal injuries from 83,000 surgical admissions to the Copenhagen City Hospital showing an incidence of 0.05 per cent. Morris (6) reported g cases of renal ruptures among 9,500 surgical admissions, an incidence of 0.09 per cent. In the surgical record of Johns Hopkins Hospital, there were 25 cases of renal injuries. In China, however, only Lowe (7) reported an isolated case of the traumatic injury of the kidney in 1925. From the surgical record of the Chinese Red Cross General Hospital, we are able to collect 4 similar cases among 2,261 admissions in the years of 1932 and 1933, an incidence of 0.17 per cent.

Patient named Yih, aged 15, male sex, came to our O.P.D. on May 15th, 1934 which the chief complaints of pain and swelling of the right retro-auricular region for a duration of five days.

Insomnia in pregnancy is a very common condition in Shanghai. It is always mild, and often lasts only a few nights. When it reduces a woman's sleep to one to two hours every night for a period of six to seven months, it becomes a rarity. The following is a case of this kind which is given in detail.

The Chinese Medical Association Survey hospitals numbered twenty-eight in 1933, and were situated in twelve of the fifteen provinces of China proper, and their patients represented a satisfactory sample of the disease population coming under modern medical observation in China today (1). Records of new in-patients and out-patients were returned and analysed on a uniform basis, and those of venereal disease will form the subject of the present communication.

Two papers in this issue of the Journal call attention to an interesting pulmonary condition, probably of an allergic nature, prevalent in Shanghai and possibly in other parts of China in the late spring or early summer. It is suggested that this condition is what has hitherto been known as privet cough, so called on the supposition that it was due to privet flowering at this time of year.

Primary malignant tumor of the nasopharynx is probably not a very common occurrence. Gatewood (8) quoted Laval to have collected only 27 such instances in the literature up to the year 1904 and Moritz and Schmidt as finding no case of carcinoma among 30,000 patients with diseases of nose and throat. Singer (19) found among 7,051 autopsies performed in Schwabing only 5 cases of malignant tumor of the naso-pharynx.

The Widal test as commonly used for the diagnosis of the typhoid group of fevers has for a number of years been looked upon with a certain degree of suspicion by clinicians. This has been on account of the difficulty of interpreting results and the frequent anomalies which are apparent when the test is either repeated on the same individual patient or performed by a different laboratory.