The nature and affinities of tubercle.

  • Southey, Reginald.
Date:
1867
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The nature and affinities of tubercle. 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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    The metamorphoses he allows to this form are softening and cretification. His third or albuminous form consisted of poppy- seed-sized glutinous granulations, which were scat- tered through the parenchyma of an organ, and were mixed, and miscible in all proportions, with a greyish sero-albuminous semi-gelatinous humour that infil- trated the diseased textures. Rokitansky allows a subsequent cell genesis to all these forms, and minutely describes the cells thus developed de novo, the free nuclei, the Punct- masse free granules, free oil cells, and the molecular fat dottings of other observers; but he lays no parti- cular stress upon any of these elements, as if neither the cells nor the nuclei presented any distinctive feature which could be relied upon for separating Tubercle from other things. No ; the argument, if argument it can be called, which he makes use of, comes to this: all these forms are exudations in the first instance, Tubercle in its broadest sense is an exudation, and therefore they are Tubercle. An inquiry into the starting-point of Tubercle brings us, he says, always to a fixed blastema, which instead of organizing into a normal tissue abides at its primitive stage of crudity. This blastema, he continues, exudes solid, by which of course he means that it solidifies close to the vessels out of which it comes, its nature being so highly coagulable that it cannot be deposited