CASE I.*- Reported by
Mr. Thomas Fuller.
James Wootten, æt. 32, admitted into Guy’s
Hospital, under Dr. Golding Bird,
Feb 6, 1850, has been residing at Long Alley, Moorfields,
and is by occupation a baker. States that he was attacked with a cough
three years since, which he was unable to get rid of by ordinary remedies,
and was finally cured at St. Bartholomew’s,
after taking pills for one week.
From this time, his skin, previously white, began to assume a darker hue,
which has been gradually increasing. Twelve months after leaving the above
hospital he was laid up from excessive weakness, the result of his cough,
which had again appeared, and incapacitated him for his work. He now became
an out-patient at St. Thomas’s, under Dr. Goolden,
who cured his cough, and
thinking that the colour of his skin depended on jaundice, treated him for
that disease, but to no purpose. He left the hospital in tolerable health,
but subsequently lost flesh, and became so excessively weak, the colour of
his skin at the same time getting rapidly darker, that he applied for
admission here, which was granted him.
Present Appearances.- The whole of the skin of his body is now a
dark hue, and he has just the appearance of having descended from coloured
parents, which he assures me is not the case, nor have any of his family
for generations, that he can answer for, manifested this peculiarity.
The colour of the skin does not at all resemble that produced by the
absorption of the nitrate of silver, but has more the appearance of the
choroid of the eye; it seems to have affected some parts of his body more
than others, the scrotum and penis being the darkest, the soles of the
feet and palms of the hands the lightest; the cheeks are a little sunken,
the nose is pointed, the conjunctivæ are of a pearly white-