The effects of certain anatomical relations : a lecture delivered before the Medical Society, Charing Cross Hospital / by James Cantlie.

  • Cantlie, James, Sir, 1851-1926.
Date:
[1888?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The effects of certain anatomical relations : a lecture delivered before the Medical Society, Charing Cross Hospital / by James Cantlie. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    pressure becomes negative. Thus the venous blood is piled up as it were by the current in the artery, and kept ready until the removal of the pressure allows its onward course. As an example of the effect of the relation of arteries to veins, take the common iliac arteries and veins. The veins and arteries on the front of the fifth lumbar vertebra are so placed that the veins are on a plain pos- terior to the arteries, and they seem plastered against the vertebral column. Now when the artery contracts there is less resistance to the passage of venous blood, but when the arterial wave is passing, the blood which is in the veins must be stemmed, and an accumulation will occur in the iliac veins of the left side, which accumulation, the moment the artery contracts, will allow for a larger rush of blood than would otherwise happen. Is it not possible, also, that the sudden expansion of the artery upon the full vein may give the blood in the vein a help and a flip, by which it will pass up the long valveless cava ? That there is a difficulty for the venous blood to pass there, is to be made out by— 1. Trying to pass a dissecting-room blow-pipe along it when the arteries are distended with injection. 2. During disease, when phlegmasia dolens exists, many museum specimens show that a thrombus extends all the way up to, but not beyond, the crossing of the left common iliac vein, behind the right common iliac artery, thus helping the notion that if fluid blood found it difficult to pass, clotted blood found it impossible. 3. The consideration that phlegmasia dolens of the right lower extremity is more often fatal than upon the left, and as the venous blood in the right iliac veins can pass more easily than in the left, so also may a clot more easily pass and thus account for the phenomenon.