Remarks and practical results of observation on scirrhus and cancer / by Antonio Scarpa ; tr. from the Italian, with an appendix containing an account of a sanguineous tumor of the breast, and some annotations on the text, by James Briggs.

  • Scarpa, Antonio, 1752-1832.
Date:
1822
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Remarks and practical results of observation on scirrhus and cancer / by Antonio Scarpa ; tr. from the Italian, with an appendix containing an account of a sanguineous tumor of the breast, and some annotations on the text, by James Briggs. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

    42/82 (page 28)
    from analogy, and the combination of the phenome- na which precede and accompany scirrhus and cancer, that it appears to me not remote from the truth to consider the scirrhus as the deposition of the seed of a more formidable malady than the scir- rhus itself, which not being susceptible of being expelled, nor carried back into the circulation, remains quiescent and innocuous in it, until by the concourse of some internal or external causes, it is brought into full activity in the part in which it is seated. The ancient physicians were of opinion that the virulence of cancer originated in an alteration of the actions of the liver, or more particularly in the black melancholic hile, deposited in some gland or other part of the body, which became thereby hard and scirrhous. Galen * went further in supposing, that ^liere the atra hilis 'was diffused through the whole body the elephantiasis was generatedy but where it was deposited in a particidar part of it, it formed the scirrhusJ'^ Whether the opinions of Galen and the older writers on surgery are erroneous in this respect I cannot determine, for the contrary has not hitherto been demonstrated; but that in which their views appear to me deserving of commendation, is their recognizing the germ of scirrhus and cancer as proceeding from the operation of internal causes. An object no less deserving of enquiry is, * De SymptQmatibus et Causis, lib. ii. cap. 2.