On the Wolffian bodies of the foetus, and their remains in the adult : including the development of the generative system / by William Mitchell Banks.

  • Banks, W. Mitchell (William Mitchell), 1842-1904.
Date:
1864
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the Wolffian bodies of the foetus, and their remains in the adult : including the development of the generative system / by William Mitchell Banks. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    existed in the broad ligament; sometimes they are much better seen on one side than on the other. Follin, who injected them with coloured turpentine, found that the injection in some cases ran up their whole course, so that he was enabled to trace them all the way up to the organ of Rosenmuller; but in many cases the canals were only permeable as far as the junction of the vagina and cervix uteri, while beyond that a mere filament was all that indicated their existence. When you can trace them in their whole course, they are found to end near or at the parovarium by a fine termination, which undergoes a variety of flexuosities and convolutions, beautifully repre- sented in a plate by Kobelt. Now, admitting these canals to be formed from the excretory ducts, and also that the parovarium corresponds to the globus minor, I think it highly probable that in this tortuous and convoluted con- dition of the terminal extremities of G-aertner's canals, we find the analogue of that similar condition of the excre- tory ducts in the male, which I have endeavoured to show forms the body and globus minor of the epididymis. In addition to the irregularities shown by these canals as regards the point at which they end and the distance to which they are permeable, they often, in place of running their whole course as tubes of an equal, or at any rate progressively diminishing calibre, present nume- rous cyst-like swellings along their track. These are in reality due to successive contractions and bulgings ; the canal swelling out and becoming distended with fluid at one point, and immediately beyond that dwindling down to a thread, and again swelling out beyond that. This is undoubtedly one of the methods in which the canals atrophy ; and hence, as I before mentioned, when they could no longer be distinguished as tubes or filaments in the broad ligament, we could trace their course by the minute cysts which constituted their remains. e2