Mollities ossium : (malakosteon, osteo-malacia, osteo-sarcosis, Knochen-Erweichung, rachitismus adultorum, rickets, or softening of the bones in the adult) / by Joseph Jones.

  • Jones, Joseph, 1833-1896.
Date:
1869
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Mollities ossium : (malakosteon, osteo-malacia, osteo-sarcosis, Knochen-Erweichung, rachitismus adultorum, rickets, or softening of the bones in the adult) / by Joseph Jones. 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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    Hollerius, Gulielmus Fabrioius Hildanus (1560—1634), Peter Borel- lus (1620—1678), Thomas Bartholin (1616—1680), and Daniel Pro- tenius, who had recorded observations apparently referring to this disease, but it is difficult to decide the nature of the softening, whe- ther the result of syphilis, cancer, or rickets! The first unequivocal observation which Morgagni quotes is that of Gabrieli, who in 1688, in dissecting the bones of a matron, found them universally softened and flexible, the long bones being con- verted into a soft, reddish flesh, apparently without tenacious fibres. Morgagni also quotes a similar observation of Courtialis, on an- other woman, whose bones could be bent, and resembled fungous and soft flesh, impregnated with a bloody serum. One of the earliest and most distinct accounts of the disease was given by Bauda, in 1665, who, in 1650, observed for ten years the progress of the disease in the case of a citizen of Sedan. Saviard, in 1691, and Lambert, in 1700, published cases. Morgagni describes briefly a case observed and related to him by Valsalva, about the latter part of the seventeenth century, although it was not published until 1760. This case of Valsalva was that of a woman who had completed her fiftieth year, and was attacked with a pain in the lower jaw, attended sometimes with so large a flux of blood, that it was intended to have restrained the discharge by the application of the actual cautery, if it had not ceased spontaneously. In a little time after the woman began to be troubled with pain in her bones; with which having long been afflicted, she began, as often as ever she was moved, to complain that all her bones were broken; and, indeed, those who stood by her are said to have heard a cracking in her joints at that time. To this symptom another was afterwards added, that the bones of the lower limbs began to be bent, as if they were made of wax, and to be in pain, even on the slightest motion. At length, in examining her body after death, the ossa innominata, the ossa femoris and tibiae, and those bones that make up the arch of the cranium, were found to be flexible, just as if they were made up of pretty thick paper; on their surface they were spongy, and at the meditullium, in some places, carious. Morgagni afterwards saw these bones, for Valsalva had preserved them, and describes the oblong ones as curved into the form of an arch, and those that composed the vault of the cranium depressed into the figure of a plane. Morgagni further records the interesting observation that all of them were of a very bad color, and small, because they could not