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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    impossible to examine some of the commoner forms of advanced prostatic hypertrophy without being struck with their resemblance to what I would describe as growing casts of the interior of a frequently contracting bladder. But it may be urged that if repeated expulsive action on the part of the bladder causes enlargement of the prostate to follow, how is it that stone and urethral stricture do not in like manner occasion it as a uniform consequence ? To this I would reply that stone and stricture as excitants of expul- sion are general or varying in their operations, and do not, as a rule, merely involve a limited area of the bladder wall, consequently the hypertrophy following stricture is universal so far as the viscus is concerned. In the same way, the whole bladder is implicated when a growing prostate becomes in addition an obstacle to micturition. When a stone is fixed to the bladder, it is, I believe, subjected to precisely similar influences on the part of the bladder wall immediately adjacent to it as those described in connection with the trigone, and may result, as I have seen, in a circumferential development of muscular tissue sufficient in some instances to produce sacculation. This is not an uncommon process, and may be studied with advantage in those cases where secondary calculi are developed as a consequence of surface irregularities produced by a large prostate, and which I have referred to elsewhere as fixed or stationary stones.* Further, it may be urged that such an explanation cannot be held to cover those instances where persons with more or less enlarged prostates do not suffer from them. I have investigated cases of this kind generally with the result of finding out that, at some period in their history, considerable urinary irritation was present and persistent. That an hypertrophy may prove to be a precise compensation, with- * Annals of Surgery, June, 1885.