Renal tension and its treatment by surgical means / by Reginald Harrison.

  • Reginald Harrison
Date:
[1901]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Renal tension and its treatment by surgical means / by Reginald Harrison. 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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    venous in origin, by local blood-letting; so we have good a priori reasons for thinking that it is possible to relieve a congestion of the kidney by punctures or in- cisions, and if this were done it cannot be doubted that, at least in some cases, the albumen in the urine would disappear and the amount of urine excreted would in- crease. So many conditions that used to be considered wholly within the province of the physician have now come under surgical treatment that we can hardly be surprised at a further advance in the same direction, but no one anticipated that the aid of the surgeon would ever be invoked in acute nephritis and other allied patho- logical conditions. The matter is, of course, not yet one on which a decided opinion can be expressed, for the cases are too few ; but the unsatisfactory results of the treatment ordinarily pursued in albuminuria and in suppression of urine from nephritis are amply sufficient to justify a method of procedure which promises so much. From The Lancet, June 15, 1901. Puncture of the Kidney for Nephritis. The surgeon is ever invading the province of the physician, and so accustomed have we become to this that we hear without surprise of some new surgical method of treatment for a disease always hitherto assigned to the physician, but of all morbid conditions inflammation of such an organ as the kidney might have been thought the least likely to be subjected to the surgeon’s knife. A few years ago Mr. Reginald Harrison, in his presidential address to the Medical Society of London, drew attention to the numerous cases which have been recorded in which a kidney has been cut down upon in expectation of some gross lesion being found, and nothing of any importance has been discovered, yet decided improvement in the symptoms has followed the operation. Mr. Harrison suggested that the improvement was due to the relief of tension. 3
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