On articular cartilage / by Alex. Ogston.

  • Ogston, Alexander, 1844-1929
Date:
[1875]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On articular cartilage / by Alex. Ogston. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    their pathological conditions. Those parts with whose normal characters we are best acquainted are those whose pathology is best understood, while we comprehend little of the pathology of such organs as the supra-renal capsules of whose physiological design we are ignorant. Therefore our advances in physiologi¬ cal science, whatever be their intrinsic value, are eagerly applied by the pathologist to his own researches, and always with profit and enlightenment. The contemptible role assigned to articular cartilage has dissatisfied many. It has been remarked that, from our present basis, we are incapable of comprehending what observation teaches us of its behaviour, that we cannot, for instance, explain why cartilage is not worn away, while the hardest and most resisting structures, like the enamel of the teeth, show the effects of friction in a short space of time. In fact it is plain that, to comprehend cartilage at all, we must go back to the very beginning, and acquire a correct notion of its physiology, before we can progress beyond our present attainments in its pathology. In the first place, and bearing in mind the universal exist¬ ence of incrusting cartilage in articulations, the question natu¬ rally suggests itself,—what would occur in a joint suppose it were performing its usual functions unmutilated in every way save in being deprived of its cartilage of incrustation ? Such a condition does not occur naturally under any circumstances, and experimentally it would be impossible to produce it, for the interference with other structures which would necessarily be entailed, and the known results following such interference, would vitiate or nullify any conclusions that might be sought to be drawn from the experiment. Hence we are compelled to fall back on other means of obtaining a clue to how the query should be answered; and there is but one means, and that the observation of a pathological process, which to any extent fulfils the conditions required. In Chronic Rheumatic Arthritis (.Arthritis Deformans) we have a disease where, while bones, ligaments and synovial mem¬ branes continue, at least in the earlier stages, to perform their functions in something approaching to the normal manner, considerable surfaces of the articular facets where bone rubs