A treatise on gall-stones : their chemistry, pathology, and treatment / by J. L. W. Thudichum.

  • Thudichum, J. L. W. (John Louis William), 1829-1901.
Date:
MDCCCLXIII. [1863]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A treatise on gall-stones : their chemistry, pathology, and treatment / by J. L. W. Thudichum. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    worked out with such extraordinary minuteness. The book was published at Zurich in the year 1565, the same year in which the work on fossils appeared, after the com- pletion of which both Kentmann and Gesner died. “ Kentmann (says Coe, p. xii) wrote a very small tract on twelve sorts of calculi found in different parts of the body, to which he added plates exhibiting the various figures of them, and among the rest speaks of those of the gall- bladder. The account he gives of them is (as will be seen below) very short, but he describes their size, shape, and inward texture better than any other author I have seen of his time or indeed of the remainder of that or the succeeding century.” Coe also erroneously remarks that Kentinann’s treatise was not published by itself, but in Gesner’s book (‘He omni rer. foss. gen.’), and in the year 1565, and thereby accounts for the circumstance, which is a matter of surprise to him, that so little notice was taken of it by medical men, who derived all their in- formation about gall-stones from Fernelius, or ascribed to him all the merit of their description, notwithstanding that all Kentmann had said about gall-stones was tran- scribed and quoted by Schenckius in his collection of ob- servations. The hypothesis which Kentmann propounds relative to the origin of gall-stones is pecidiar, and, singularly enough, couched in very bad Latin phraseology. Bile, he says, was burned by the heat of the liver, and concreted to a cal- culus in the gall-bladder, whence he himself had known them to be taken (sc. calculi). Tt was not less true that these calculi caused great obstructions in the vessels and many violent symptoms, about which the most experienced physicians might be in doubt. He continues, that as physicians had become more careful about their dis- sections, they had not only found two or three, but some-