Selected monographs.

  • New Sydenham Society.
Date:
1888
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)

    360/372 (page 56)
    5G all traces of primary and of secondary deformation are only too completely confused or blotted out. The question therefore whether there was or was not a primary infraction in the arch of the fifth lumbar vertebra of the Zurich pelvis must remain open for the present. Such probably is the etiology of the case, but it can only be proved in the course of time by a process of exclusion. Of the 17 specimens of spondylolisthetic pelvis known to exist I have had at one time or another an opportunity of examining 10, namely, the two at Prague, Olshausen's case at Halle, that at Breslau, the Prague-Wurzburg case, the second Wurzburg case I have now recorded, that at Munich, those at Paderborn (?) and Zurich, the pelvis of the Hottentot Venus, and besides .these ten the two specimens of olisthesis in the penultimate lumbar vertebra lately described at Berlin and Breslau. In reference to the other seven cases the Halle- Giesener one of Blasius appears to be lost, and in this case, as well as in that of the pelvis at Treves, I decidedly doubt the accuracy of the pathological-anatomical diagnosis between spondylolisthesis and caries. As to the remaining six pelves, I must confine myself to a consideration of the verbal descriptions which have been given of them, and of the pictures. My investigations at present have led me to take the following view of the etiology of the so-called spondylolisthesis :— (1) A Congenital Spondylolisthesis Interarticularis may EXIST IN THE ARCH OF THE FlFTH LlJMBAR VERTEBRA ON ONE OR BOTH SIDES.* This mode of origin is certainly indicated anatomically in several cases of the class; for example, in those at Paris and * In reference to spondyl-olisthesis interarticularis congenita, I would now add to the 59 cases enumerated in my last work (Archiv fiir Gynak., Bd. xxi., Heft 2) some new cases that I have met with in Friburg, Basle, Strasburg, and Paris. jST0. 60.—Bilateral of the fifth lumbar vertebra, number 0.11.6 of the Friburg Anatomical Museum. No. 61.—Bilateral of the fifth lumbar vertebra, with separation of the posterior part of the arch into two lateral arches through the spine {ibidem). No. 62.—Bilateral of the fifth lumbar vertebra, unnumbered, in a vertebral column with six sacral and five lumbar vertebra (ibidem).