Chronic endarteritis, and its clinical and pathological effects (chronic Bright's disease) / by Arthur V. Meigs.

  • Meigs, Arthur Vincent, 1850-1912.
Date:
[1889]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Chronic endarteritis, and its clinical and pathological effects (chronic Bright's disease) / by Arthur V. Meigs. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    among ordinarily recognized diseases than it would have been right tor Bright to withhold his great addition to the sum of pathological knowledge because there was still more to be learned in the same line of thought. Since there has come to me the feeling that I have more understanding of the path- ology of the disease than formerly, the clinical management of cases often occasions a good deal of difficulty by placing me in an awkward position with my patients when they or their friends ask : What is the disease with which they are suffer- ing? To say Blight's disease in every case in which albu- men and casts are found in the urine would be very far from a correct expression of my understanding of the malady, for the instant conclusion of the public is that the patient lias a disease which is as incurable as cancer, and one which will terminate in death almost as soon; whereas in many cases I believe that complete recovery, so far as the further progress of organic change is concerned, takes place, and I know that, in many others the patients live in comfort for long periods of years. Such being the case, a name is needed by which to designate the disease, and it must be one from which the word kidney will be excluded, for it may be asserted that it is now known that the disease does not necessarily involve kidney change, and, if it does, that such change is only a very small part of the whole, and is subsidiary to something else. The pathological lesion which is always present, and which, so far as investigations made up to the present time show to be most widely diffused through the organs and tissues of the body, is an inflammatory thickening of the intima of the arteries and arterioles, and, whether the future will show this to be the primary and original change and the true cause or not, it is so widely diffused and so important that to call it the disease seems to me much more correct and descriptive than any other that has been proposed. Chronic endarteritis, a simple inflam- mation of the lining of the arteries, is the process by which the disease begins and thence extends to almost any degree throughout the arterial system, to some degree into the veins, and probably into the capillaries, as has been proved by the
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