Thoracic resection for tumors growing from the bony wall of the chest / F.W. Parham.

  • Parham, Frederick W.
Date:
1899
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Thoracic resection for tumors growing from the bony wall of the chest / F.W. Parham. 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.

    36/182 page 28
    Institute of France. English translation by Thomas Wilson, 24 pp., 8vo. Philadelphia, Town and others, 1818.) Gentlemen : I have the honor to inform you of a sur- gical operation of which the record of the art furnishes no example—a new operation demanded by necessity and justi- fied by success. M. Michellan, surgeon at Nemours, for three years had been afflicted with a cancerous tumor in the region of the heart, the eradication of which a neighboring surgeon at- tempted in Januar}^ last. At the removal of the first dress- ing a bloody fungus appeared in the centre of the wound; cauterized at each dressing, it grew again with activity. A second operation was attempted. This penetrated more deeply. After having laid the ribs bare he went to the pleura; in the meantime new fungi displayed themselves, and were reproduced, notwithstanding repeated cauteriza- tions, by means of which it was endeavored to repress them. Grieved at not reaping any benefit from so many and so pain- ful operations, the patient came to Paris toward the end of March, fully determined to suffer everything in hopes of being delivered from so dreadful a disorder, and of escaping an inevitable death. At this period an enormous fungus was springing up in the Avound. From this brown and flimsv vegetation oozed an abundant sanies, reddish, and so fcetid that it was impossible to remain a quarter of an hour near the patient without renewing the air of the apartment. The pains, nevertheless, were moderate; he experienced neither sweats nor colliqua- tive diarrhcea; and, although tormented with an old and habitual cough, the patient, aged forty years, of a robust complexion, presented the most encouraging moral disposi- tion. In this state of things it was resolved to attempt a resection of those ribs from which it was thought the caucer originated. Entrusted with this operation, I informed the patient that very probal)ly I should be obliged to cut away a portion of the ])h'ura ; ho did not hesitate U^ submit himself
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