On the nature and treatment of some painful affections of bone / by Langston Parker.

  • Parker, Langston, 1805?-1871.
Date:
1852
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the nature and treatment of some painful affections of bone / by Langston Parker. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    most experienced surgeons have often found it diffi¬ cult to decide on the exact source or nature of the pain which has had its seat in a diseased bone. It has appeared to me that many of these painful affections of bone are of inflammatory origin, and that the inflammation is seated in the medullary membrane of the shaft, or that which lines, imperfectly, the cancelli and canals of the extremities of long bones. The chief anatomical characters of the medullary membrane of the long bones are extreme tenuity, great vascularity, and excessive sensibility. In many characters it differs essentially from the periosteum, which is neither so thin, so sensible, or so vascular. It is through the medium of the medullary membrane, which is supplied in each long bone with its special artery, that the whole of the internal structures of the bone are nourished and supported; and hence it is that death of the bone follows the destruction of the medullary membrane as the experiments of Troja have already proved ; and it is equally probable that necrosis of portions of the shafts of the long bones may follow a partial destruction of the medullary membrane from inflammation. I have just stated that the medullary membrane is very vascular, so much so that it frequently forms a species of hernia from the medullary canal of a long