Addison and the white corpuscles : an aspect of nineteenth-century biology / L. J. Rather.

  • Rather, L. J.
Date:
1972 [i.e. 1971]
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Addison and the white corpuscles : an aspect of nineteenth-century biology / L. J. Rather. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    the doctrine of cellular pathology', Edinb. med. J. y 1863, 8, 873—97; cf. p. 875). After reviewing the evidence Turner was able to make no stronger a statement in favour of Virchow's cellular pathology than that 'the doctrine, that pathological cell-formations arise from pre-existing textural elements [i.e. cells] has not been founded on insufficient data' (ibid., p. 897). Turner, incidentally, noted that Schleiden, 'usually considered as a supporter of the theory of free cell-formation ', in fact ' fully recognized that the new cells of plants were never formed except within those already existing' (ibid., p. 875; cf. also Ch. III. 1, note 7). Again, when Charles Darwin turned his attention to the matter in 1868 he noted that 'Virchow, the great supporter of the cellular theory, whilst allowing that difficulties exist, main tains that every atom of tissue is derived from cells, and these from pre-existing cells, and these primarily from the egg, which he regards as a great cell. . . . Another school main tains that cells and tissues of all kinds may be formed in dependently of pre-existing cells from plastic lymph or blastema; and this is thought well exhibited in the repair of wounds.' Darwin's modest conclusion was that since he had no special competence in the matter 'it would be pre sumptuous in me to express an opinion of the two opposed doctrines' ( The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication , London, 1868, 2 vols., vol. 2, p. 370). Darwin thought it safer to use instead of 'cell' the term ' organic unit ' of E. Montgomery (cited on p. 370 by Darwin as the author of On the Formation of So-Called Cells in Animal Bodies , 1867, in which the formation of cells from other cells was denied; for Huxley's two views see Ch. III. 1, note 10). The supposed mode of formation of new cells in morbid exudates continued to be the last stronghold of the blastema theory. In France we find Charles Robin writing in 1874 that the 'mediate condition of suppuration is a disturbance of the capillary circulation, and the immediate condition is the production of a blastema with the aid and at the expense of which the genesis of leucocytes takes place'. While Robin makes allowance also for the escape of leucocytes from