Selected Monographs.

  • New Sydenham Society.
Date:
1888
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Selected Monographs. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by UCL Library Services. The original may be consulted at UCL (University College London)

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    general paralysis; as if in the last case paralysis and gangrene were not allied to profound and general lesions of nutrition very different from a simple neurosis. These facts have at least the incontestable merit of establishing this capital point, that there are gangrenes without alteration of vessels. I have found valuable indications in a very remarkable memoir by M. Charles Racle, entitled, Memoir on some new characters of gangrene, and upon the existence of this lesion in maladies in which it has not yet been described.* The chapter entitled Gangrene with nervous phenomena contains some passages which so closely resemble some of my own observations that I cannot doubt that M. Racle has had before him similar cases to those which I have recorded. He insists on the constant limitation of this gangrene to the skin, on the white horn-like aspect which the external tegument takes in these circumstances, and upon the integrity of the general health which frequently accompanies the appearance of this malady. These remarks are obviously the result of exact observation. I learn moreover from the brother of the author, who is at present physician of the Hopital des Enfants Malades, that the material for this memoir had been gathered in that institution, and that M. C. Racle had been impressed like myself with the symmetry of the gangrenous lesions. Unfortunately this work remains unfinished, so that many features which are easily recognised when one has observed them oneself remain enig- matical for those who have not had the living picture actually under their eyes. Before tracing the history of the malady which makes the principal object of this study, I believe it necessary to discuss in some measure, spontaneous gangrene considered by itself, and independently of the lesions which can give rise to it. It is the necessary preamble of what I have to say upon the particular variety with which we are concerned. IV. Pathological Anatomy and Physiology of Spontaneous Gangrene. Almost all authors who have written upon gangrene define it as a partial death. A crowd of variations or circumlocu- tions have been proposed in place of this brief exposition of the * Published in the Gazette medicale de Paris, 1859.