On some rare and new diseases : suggestions for the study of part of the natural history of disease : the Bradshawe lecture delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1882 / by Sir James Paget.

Date:
1883
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On some rare and new diseases : suggestions for the study of part of the natural history of disease : the Bradshawe lecture delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1882 / by Sir James Paget. 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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    improbable. We must believe that all the most acute and observant practitioners before our time overlooked, uot merely obscure and transient diseases, difficult to study, but cases which lasted many years, and gave constant great distress, and were manifested in signs so plain that they could be recognised in the shape and gait, in the posture and whole aspect of the patients, in strangely large heads and curved limbs. And, further, we must believe that the morbid anatomists before ourselves over- looked changes of structures of the largest, most obvious, and most striking kind. It is, surely, very unlikely that they who studied and recorded such cases as those of extreme rickets and mollities ossium, and even called it rachitis adultorum and kept specimens of it, should have left unnoticed the cases of these two equally and some- what similarly disfiguring and damaging diseases. This great improbability is strengthened by that which I believe to be a fact—that we have none but recently collected specimens of either of these diseases in our museums ; not even among the crowds of bones and joints collected by our predecessors. In twenty-six years I have seen thirteen well-marked cases of the osteitis deformans, and abont as many in which it was only partially evident. In the last six of these years I have seen seven of these cases, and others have been published, and yet I cannot find evidence that the disease was ever seen by any of those who had practice like my own. Brodie and Stanley, who saw as many cases of diseased bones as any surgeons of the last generation, had seen no case but that which I showed them more than twenty-five years ago in the patient from whom these specimens were taken. Moreover, I cannot find an old specimen in our museums, or a representation of one in any book of plates, or a description of one in any cata-