The pathology and treatment of diseases of the ovaries / by Lawson Tait. --.

  • Tait, Lawson, 1845-1899.
Date:
1883
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The pathology and treatment of diseases of the ovaries / by Lawson Tait. --. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    marked at the point of impending rupture, and its vessels are visible to the naked eye on the surface of the ovary. The rup- ture takes place at last, and the ovum escapes either into the peritoneal cavity, where it perishes, save in exceptional cases, or into the pavilion of the oviduct, whence it is conducted to the uterus. I believe that the ovum falls into and perishes in the peritoneal cavity in by far the greater number of cases, and that the passage of it into the uterus occurs only in a small minority of the ova produced. The vessels ruptured in the act of the escape of the ovum bleed slightly, and this hemorrhage occupies the emptied cavity, and must, in many cases, along with the liquor folliculi, also pass into the peritoneal cavity. I have re- peatedly seen a clot hanging from a ruptured ovisac into the cavity of the peritoneum, and on one occasion I saw the follicle rupture before I had touched the ovary, which lay exposed on a uterine tumor. Spiegelberg (loc. cit.) tells us that in women this hemorrhage is very insignificant, as it is also in the cow. In the mare and sheep it is entirely absent, and is most marked in the sow. I have seen nothing to make me believe that in wo- men it is ever so severe as to be pathological, but I can easily imagine that sometimes it may really be so, and may explain those rare and mysterious cases of recurrent pelvic hsematocele of limited extent, of which I have lately seen a most curious in- stance in the wife of one of my professional brethren. After the rupture the follicle collapses, and the thickened inner coat is thrown into a series of convolutions strikingly re- sembling those of the brain, though I am by no means sure that these convolutions are not indicated before the rupture occurs. I have seen them in an unruptured ovisac before pu- berty, but as the ovary had been pickled in chromic acid for section-cutting, they may have been produced by preparation. I have also seen them in an unripe sac opened immediately after removal of the ovary. Here again they may have been pro- duced instantaneously by the relief of tension. On a favorable opportunity I shall freeze a fresh ovary before cutting it, and settle this interesting question. The rent in the ovisac soon heals, and the cavity is again closed, with a small clot in its centre, and this clot was formerly accredited as the source of all the phenomena of the much-dis- cussed corpus luteum. It deserves no such distinction, and it soon becomes decolorized and is absorbed, so that the points of the convolutions come into contact, ultimately coalesce, and finally form the stellate cicatrix which marks for a long time the site of the ovisac. The capillaries of the inner or yellow coat are very regular, and, in a well-injected section, resemble