On the origin and relations of new growths : the Goulstonian Lectures for 1874 delivered at the Royal College of Physicians / by Joseph Frank Payne.

  • Payne, Joseph Frank, 1840-1910.
Date:
1874
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the origin and relations of new growths : the Goulstonian Lectures for 1874 delivered at the Royal College of Physicians / by Joseph Frank Payne. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    are nearly what Virchow distinguishes as pseudo-plasmen or true growths (Gewachse). The group thus limited includes all new formations, in the form of a more or less circumscribed mass, of substance resembling the simple tissues of the body, or immature stages of them; it includes also those productions known as cancers, and various growths nearly allied to these, known as sarcomatous tumours. Among the simple tissue-tumours, I recognise fibrous (fibroma), mucous (myxoma), fatty (lipoma), cartilaginous (enchondroma), osseous (osteoma), vascular (angioma), muscular (myoma), nervous (neuroma), glandular (adenoma), and lymphatic (lymphoma and lymphangioma). Under cancers, I include epithelial cancer or epithelioma; and, under sarcomatous tumours, several forms which approximate to simple growths. Finally, there are combinations of the forms just mentioned. I shall not attempt to define the class thus made up, except by simple enumera¬ tion. The characters of the smaller groups are tolerably well marked, and no practical difficulty need arise in knowing what kind of objects it is intended to discuss. The chief fact which all these structures have in common is the fact of growth or increase, and, moreover, of a growth which appears to be, in a certain sense, independent of that of the body, as if the tumour had some separate life of its own. So strongly did this impress the older observers, that for a long time tumours were regarded as something parasitic, or foreign to the organism. Harvey has expressed this conception very distinctly. After showing that embryos, once fecundated, are inspired with a soul, or cinima vegetativa of their own, which may be taken to mean, in Harvey’s philosophical language, what we should now call a separate life, “ and this”, he says, “when they have received, they order themselves and grow, living at their own, not their parents’, command”.“And in this manner”, he goes on, “doe mushrooms and plants growing to trees live. We discover likewise in our own bodies, that cancers, fleshy and also phlegmatical tumours and such like swellings, are supplied and fed as it were with their own proper vegetative souls, while in the interim the live and genuine parts of the body do extenuate and wither, and that because these tumours do seduce all the aliment to themselves ; and so defraud the rest of the body of its fostering juice (as of its genius) wherefore they are called phagedoenoe and lupi, devouring cankers and wolves.” (Ana¬ tomical Examinations concerning Generation, p. 153. London, 1653.) The idea of a separate life is of course now untenable, and no one can