A practical treatise on the diseases of the liver and biliary passages / by William Thomson ... also, Clinical illustrations of diseases of the liver and spleen, by William Twining.

  • Thomson, William, 1943-2017.
Date:
1842
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A practical treatise on the diseases of the liver and biliary passages / by William Thomson ... also, Clinical illustrations of diseases of the liver and spleen, by William Twining. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Lamar Soutter Library, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Lamar Soutter Library at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

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    MALIGNANT DEGENERATIONS OF THE LIVER. 123. In a large proportion of the cases in which morbid growths referrible to any of those forms of new structures or accidental tex- tures to which pathologists apply the term malignant (comprehend- ing the various modifications of scirrhous, cancerous, encephaloid, hasmatoid, and melanose tumours), are met with in the liver, post- mortem examination shows that similar growths exist likewise in other organs or textures of the body; and there seem good grounds for believing that, in a considerable number of such cases, the development of these growths in the liver is posterior to their ap- pearance in one or in several of the other parts. Of all organs, says Dr. Hodgkin, the liver is perhaps the most liable to become the seat of secondary depositions of malignant tumours or tuber- cles. We find them in this situation when the primary formation has taken place in the eye, the breast, the stomach, the rectum, the mesentery, the kidney, the testicle, or, perhaps, in many other situations. 124. Of very many cases of malignant degeneration of the liver, which have fallen under our own observation, a considerable num- ber has occurred in females, who had undergone at different periods before death, amputation of the mamma ; a considerable number has been in individuals who laboured under malignant affection of the stomach; several in persons whose death was primarily attributable to cancerous obstruction of the intestinal canal; and several, also, in persons in whom extirpation of the eyeball had been practised, on account of malignant disease of that organ. 125. But whilst the development of malignant growths in the liver seems frequently'- to be consecutive to their development in other parts of the body, it is not invariably so, for it occasionally happens that the liver is the first and the only organ in which they occur. Thus, several cases of fungus hsematodes have been re- lated by Mr. Langstaff (Med. Chir. Trans, viii. 288, 291 ; ix. 302), in which this affection occurred in the liver exclusively, showing, as he observes, that this disease may attack an important organ, and produce death, without the specific disease difiusing itself to any other viscus. 126. Whether cancer of the liver occurs as a primary, or as a secondary or consecutive affection, it may be limited to only a single point, and, spreading from this, attack the contiguous parts in succession; or it may be developed in a number of different points of the organ at the same time. Consecutive cancer, limited to a single point, may arise from contiguity of texture. Thus, as Cruveilhier remarks, it is not uncommon for cancer of the small curvature of the stomach to attack the lower surface of the liver (which, having become intimately united to that curvature, re- places the parts of the stomach that have been destroyed), in such