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.

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    the appearance of the disease^ in other words, du- ring the first period of the scirrhus *. If to so powerful a testimony as this my own ex- perience can add any weight, I must ingenuously declare that I have been unsuccessful and disap- pointed in my expectations whenever I have ex- tirpated the scirrhus, accompanied by unequivocal signs of the tumour having entered into the second stage. In the whole course of a long practice three cases only of extirpation of genuine scirrhus of the breast have had a prosperous result with me, these being the only three in which I was so fortunate as to perform the operation within the first months from the appearance of the disease, before the unplea- sant sense of pruritus and heat had taken place, and consequently that of the lancinating pains. The operation, in all these instances, was performed by the removal of the whole mammary gland, al- though the scirrhus occupied scarcely two thirds of it; and in each of them, when the internal, altered * Of the tv/o cases in which the operation was repeated, one was that of struma, before mentioned, and the other must have been similar to it. All the other twenty-five were cases of ge- nuine scirrhus which is far more frequent than the struma of the mammary gland. Nor is it to be supposed, considering the in- frequency of this latter affection, that in the twenty-seven cases in which Flajani had performed the operation he had met with those of struma only and not of sciirhus.