A practical treatise on inflamation of the uterus, its cervix and appendages, and on its connection with uterine disease.

  • Bennet, James Henry, 1816-1891.
Date:
1860
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A practical treatise on inflamation of the uterus, its cervix and appendages, and on its connection with uterine disease. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    To render this statement intelligible to those who are unacquainted with the medical institutions of Paris, I may mention that that city is remarkable for the extent and number of its special hospitals. There are immense separate establishments for the young, the adult, and the aged, as also for the syphilitic, the scrofulous, and those affected with skin diseases. Into these the house physicians and the house sur- geons (who hold their appointments for four years) are successively draughted, so that, in the six or seven years during which the Paris interne's connection with the hospitals lasts, at first as a pupil, and- subsequently as a resident functionary, disease is studied on a large scale, in very varied fields. These successive changes of the point of view from which pathology is seen, I found of the greatest possible use. Uterine disease is not the same at St. Lazare, where five hun- dred prostitutes, affected principally with primary syphilis, are treated, as it is at the Hopital St. Louis, the receptacle for cutaneous syphilis and scrofula, or as at the general hospitals, where non-syphilitic patients are received. Even in the latter, great differences exist; some — such as La Pitie—being near La Maternite*, where several thousand women are delivered annually, receive many patients recently discharged from that hospital; others—such as La Charite* and the Hotel Dieu—depend more on the general population; whilst in the Salpetriere, which contains three thousand five hundred women above sixty years of age, and several hundred incurable cancerous patients, the uterine field again changes. I do not mean to say that the same forms of disease are not met with in these various establishments,—for such an assertion would be erroneous,—but that the proportions in which they show themselves, and often the modes of their manifesta- tion, differ considerably. An outline of my views on the subject of which I am about to treat, was hastily sketched and presented to the Faculty of Medicine of Paris, in the form of a thesis, on my graduating at that university. The present more elaborate essay was published in parts, in the Lancet of this year ; and as I think the facts and views which it contains are of importance, I now reproduce them in a more extended and complete form. Under such circumstances, I cannot, certainly, be reproached with not having matured my opinions. In the first instance, they were formed after I had long enjoyed very great oppor-