Remarks on the relations of pulmonary tuberculosis to other diseases / by F. Parkes Weber.

  • Weber, Frederick Parkes, 1863-1962.
Date:
[1904]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Remarks on the relations of pulmonary tuberculosis to other diseases / by F. Parkes Weber. 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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    to the lungs but likewise to the general defective develop- ment of such patients, especially to a tendency to “in- fantilism” (see later section). Percy Kidd11 says: “Such persons are born with imperfect lungs and it is not to be wondered at that these organs should be prone to so common a disease as tuberculosis.” Relations of pulmonary tuberculosis to diseases of the liver. —Amyloid disease of the liver is well known as occasionally due to suppuration connected with tuberculous disease in various parts of the body, but it is really only a very rare com- plication of tuberculosis of the lungs and, owing to modern surgical and other methods of treatment, it is doubtless becoming a much less frequent complication of tuberculosis altogether, even of hip disease and spinal caries. Enlarge- ment of the liver from fatty infiltration is so frequently found in consumptive patients dying after prolongea hectic fever that a causal connexion between the two conditions is universally admitted. Most probably the glandular cells of the liver become so damaged by the febrile condition, or, rather, by the toxsemic cause of the pyrexia, that their metabolic functions become seriously impaired. Their feeble power of combustion is then shown by the accumulation of the fatty droplets. I should here state that probably there is no sharp demarcation line between fatty infiltration and fatty degeneration of the liver ; the latter process is probably really a fatty infiltration in an atrophic liver when the hepatic cells have degenerated not only in functional power but in the amount of their living cell- substance also.12 Cirrhosis of the liver is not very rarely found associated with peritoneal or pulmonary tuberculosis or both, and there are good grounds for believing that in a few cases hepatic cirrhosis may be due to a local tuberculous process.13 In regard to the association of an ascitic form of tuberculous peritonitis with cirrhosis of the liver Dr. S. Gee14 says : ‘ ‘ Perhaps the tuberculous poison sets up cirrhosis, like alcohol, and one is reminded of a similar association of ovarian tumours with cirrhosis of the liver.” There is, however, another' and more generally acknowledged connexion between 11 St. Bartholomew’s Hospital Reports, London, 1887, vol. xxiii., p. 252. 12 Cf. Ribbert: Die Morphologic und Chemie der |fettigen Degenera- tion, Deutsche Medicinische Wochensehrilt, 1903, No. 44, p. 793, 13 Vide A. Gilbert and J. Castaigne's case at the Societe de Biolouie Paris, June 3rd, 1899. 14 St. Bartholomew’s Hospital Journal, London, May, 1900, p. 116.