A history of the disease usually called typhoid fever : as it has appeared in Georgetown and its vicinity, with some reflections as to its causes and nature / by W.L. Sutton.

  • William Loftus Sutton
Date:
1850
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A history of the disease usually called typhoid fever : as it has appeared in Georgetown and its vicinity, with some reflections as to its causes and nature / by W.L. Sutton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    acteristic lesion, I cannot give a better or perhaps a more succinct description than is to be found in the work referred to. In a small proportion of cases, consisting of those which terminate early, the elliptical plates togeth- erwith the subcellular muscular tissueare merely increased in thickness, with redness and softening. This increase of thickness is such that the edges of the plates project from one to two or three lines above the surrounding mucous membrane. Sometimes the hypertrophy of the plates and of the subjacent cellular tissue is quite simple, the color and consistence of the membrane remaining unal- tered. This simplest form of the lesion, like all others, which are more complete, is universally found most ad- vanced and most strongly marked at the lower extremity of the ileum. Each successive plate as we go upward along the intestinal track from the ileo-cecal valve, is less profoundly altered, till we arrive at those in the natural condition. The number of plates thus changed is very various. [From one or two to thirty or forty.] The sur- face of the thickened plates frequently presents a granu- lar or finely mamelonated appearance occasioned by an enlargement of the gray orifices of the cryptse which go to make up the plates. This condition becomes very manifest when the gland is detached from its subjacent tissue and held between the eye and the light. At other times the surface of the thickened membrane correspond- ing to the plates is quite smooth and level. In a great majority of cases, the plates, instead of be- ing merely thickened with or without redness and soften- ing, are more or less extensively the seat of ulcerations. These ulcerations vary very much in size and number. It frequently happens, for instance, that in proceeding from above downwards, in our examination, after having passed over several plates simply thickened, we come to one of them in which there is a single circumscribed ul- ceration with perpendicular edges, extending more or less 7 *