Papers on hypertrophy of the prostate muscle / by Reginald Harrison.

  • Harrison, Reginald, 1837-1908.
Date:
[1886]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Papers on hypertrophy of the prostate muscle / by Reginald Harrison. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    nature, if it were essential to procreation, we might expect to find a certain number of fairly well authenticated cases where this function was thus brought to an end. My experience of these operations, which has been tolerably large, does not furnish grounds for believing that the procreative power has been interfered with by them. That so important a function as procreation should, as it were, be made dependent on the integrity of two organs situated at a distance from each other seems on the face of it to be unlikely. It appears to me that the office of the pros- tate, relatively to the sexual act, is that referred to by Dr. Handfield Jones * in the following passage :— These con- siderations furnish some ground for regarding the prostate as rather an assemblage of mucus follicles than really a distinct conglomerate gland; its part in the generative function is probably not to prepare any essential element of the fecundating fluid, but merely an appropriate viscid material, involved in which the seminal animalcules may be more securely transported on their destined route. The wide difference that exists in the pathology of the prostate and the testis seems to point, I submit, to their being engaged in very different functions; the former comprehend those changes which we might expect in a part consisting of follicles embedded in muscle, whilst in the latter they are those which can only happen to a highly organised gland where everything is subservient to the secreting process. I should sum up the function of the prostate relatively to the sexual act as supplying a vehicle which mechanically enables the fecundating fluid to act with greater certainty, at the same time supplying a muscular buttress against which the ejaculatory muscles of the urethra may advantageously act in the emission of the semen. * The London Medical Gazette, vol. v., 1847.