Selected monographs.

  • Kussmaul, Adolf, 1822-1902.
Date:
1859
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Selected monographs. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by UCL Library Services. The original may be consulted at UCL (University College London)

    163/455 (page 147)
    the regeneration of the bones. Elourens observed, after resections from the substance of the ribs, where the periosteum had been spared, the first trace of formation of new bone occurring on the inner surface of that membrane, and on that precise part of it which lay in the middle between the two cut ends of the bone, whence it gradually extended towards those extremities. Tliis experiment, if it be not allowed to be decisive by itseK, gains in value from the fact that it agrees with the cases described by Heine, and elucidates them; those, I mean, in wliich a considerable piece of new bone covered with periosteum lay between the cut ends of the old bones, and was united with the cut surfaces by fibrous substance. Still more important is the following well-known experiment of Elourens, to which I will here merely allude. He bored a hole down to the medullary cavity of a bone, and placed a silver tube witliin it. The periosteum and medullary membrane became tumefied, and projected into the tube, and then a piece of new bone was formed within the latter. Syme excised on two occasions a portion of each radius of a dog an inch and three quarters in length. In one leg he took away the periosteum with the bone, in the other he took the greatest care to preserve it. Six weeks later, in the leg in which the periosteum had been removed with the bone, the ends of the bone were conical and pointed, and united by a fibrous cord; on the other leg, where the periosteum had been preserved, the whole loss of substance had been repaired by a copious and even superabundant deposition of bone. Syme has discovered a further proof of the conclusion which follows from this description in two experiments, wliich do not, indeed, belong to the class of resections, but which must be men- tioned here because they combine with an experiment of Heine, to afford an answer to the question as to the activity of the perios- teum in the regeneration of bones. On a dog the periosteum was carefully separated from the radius, and a metal plate tlu'ust in between the membrane and the bone; while, in the other experi- ment, the separated periosteum was removed, and the exposed bone merely covered with a plate of metal. Six weeks afterwards there was found in the first case, above the metal, a plate of new bone, which had no connexion with the old bone; in the second case only a thick, tough capsule, without a trace of bony substance. Heine observed the same things in the femur of a dog as Syme did in the first case. The piece of bone was denuded of periosteum.