Lectures on the principles of surgical diagnosis : especially in relation to shock and visceral lesions, delivered before the Royal College of Surgeons of England. / By F. Le Gros Clark.

  • Clark, Frederick Le Gros, 1811-1892.
Date:
MDCCCLXX. [1870]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Lectures on the principles of surgical diagnosis : especially in relation to shock and visceral lesions, delivered before the Royal College of Surgeons of England. / By F. Le Gros Clark. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    mechanical obstacle to its healing. So, in like manner, although there are distinguishing features in the consequences of inflammation affecting different tissues, there is identity in all essentials ; the points of non-resemblance being dependent on the physical peculiarities of the affected textures. Bone- abscess, diffused suppuration, caries, necrosis, what are they but the consequences of the same proximate causes acting in bone, as in tissues differing in the physical characters of density and resistance and in their elementary constituents ? But in all there is the same organisation,—the same, that is, in quality, though varying in degree ; and there is thus, in all, the sus- ceptibility to injury, the necessity for repair, and the liability to death : therefore we find, as we should anticipate from such data, that the same phenomena are witnessed, in these various lesions, attending the reparative inflammation or hyperaemia of the injured part, though stamped by the peculiarities of locality or of tissue, which thus impart apparently special character- istics that are, in reality, accidental and unimportant. So, likewise, in actual reparation. The agglutination of the broken ends of a severed bone, the healing of an abscess, the separa- tion of a sequestrum, the closing of a carious cavity, are essentially identical with the healing of wounds in soft parts by adhesion, the separation of slough, and granulation. I do not adduce those facts as novel; but simply as exem- plifying the importance of generalising where we can, and of the value of general principles in reading the phenomena of disease and in interpreting its problems. Inflammation is not now viewed as essentially mischievous in its tendency—a disease per se^ to be combated by all avail- able means in our power. Its friendly services are, indeed, under certain circumstances, hailed with satisfaction. I would even venture further, and regard inflammation as always friendly in design, though that intention is often frustrated, or aggravated into mischief. I think it doubtful whether inflam- mation is ever the prhnujti tnobile in the evil consequences