The Probert Encyclopaedia of Medicine

ATROPHY

Atrophy is a wasting of the flesh due to some interference with the nutritive processes. It may arise from a variety of causes, such as permanent, oppressive, and exhausting passions, organic disease, a want of proper food or of pure air, suppurations in important organs, copious evacuations of blood, saliva, semen, etc, and it is also sometimes produced by poisons, for example arsenic, mercury, lead, in miners, painters, gilders, etc. In old age the whole frame except the heart undergoes atrophic change, and it is of frequent occurrence in infancy as a consequence of improper, unwholesome food, exposure to cold, damp, or impure air, etc. Single organs or parts of the body may be affected irrespective of the general state of nutrition; thus local atrophy may be superinduced by palsies, the pressure of tumours upon the nerves of the limbs, or by artificial pressure, as in the feet of Chinese ladies.
Research Atrophy