On human entozoa : comprising the description of the different species of worms found in the intestines and other parts of the human body, and the pathology and treatment of the various affections produced by their presence : to which is added a glossary of the principal terms employed / by Wm. Abbotts Smith.

Date:
1863
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On human entozoa : comprising the description of the different species of worms found in the intestines and other parts of the human body, and the pathology and treatment of the various affections produced by their presence : to which is added a glossary of the principal terms employed / by Wm. Abbotts Smith. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    liable to the attacks of vesicular worms, which have not been met with in the synovial cavities, or in the peritoneum, in man, unless they happen to have reached the latter cavity accidentally, owing to the rupture of a cyst situated in one of the abdominal viscera. The cavities in which vesicular worms have been observed in a free state in man are the cerebral ventricles, the arachnoid membrane, the chambers of the eye, the pleura, the pericardium, and the tunica vaginalis testis. Although this enumeration suffices to show that vesicular worms may live in a free state in most of the natural serous cavities, they are not very often found in these situations, especially in man; and it is, in fact, in the parenchymatous organs that they most frequently make their habitat; they are, how- ever, separated from the tissue composing these viscera by an adventitious pouch or cyst, whose structure is analogous to that of a natural serous membrance. In whatever part of the body the vesicular worms may be developed, they possess no action upon the viscus in which they are contained except indirectly, through the medium of the membrane which encloses them, and this action presents no difference, whether they are contained within a natural or an adventitious cavity, as the effects produced by these entozoa are only those which result from compression. The lesions which are produced by the existence of hydatids in man will be first discussed; and, subsequently, those which are produced by the presence of cysticerci.