Clinical lecture on phlebitis and thrombosis / by B. Wills Richardson.

  • Richardson, Benjamin Wills.
Date:
1863
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Clinical lecture on phlebitis and thrombosis / by B. Wills Richardson. 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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    attached to the South Dublin Workhouse Hospital during the same epidemic, and examined some dozens of cases in which the large intestine was extensively ulcerated, but I did not meet with one case of abscess, although in many I found the liver extremely softened. Dr. Budd thinks that suppuration of the liver, in addition to having a phlebitic origin, may be also caused by foetid gaseous and liquid contents of the large intestine being absorbed and conveyed to the liver. And he thinks abscesses are more frequent with the sloughing form of ulceration in acute dysentery. With regard to the supposed arrest of the pus cells in the capillaries, the question may be asked, why should they be arrested at all ? If I do not mistake, there is a close similarity between the white blood cell and pus cor- puscle, and yet the former pass through the capillaries. This is, I consider, the weak point in the theory regarding the arrest of the pus. Something more would be necessary, either a paralyzing influence of the pus cell on the vessels, or an agglutination of several corpuscles, so as form a mass larger than the calibre of the capillary, and which consequently could not pass, and would excite suppurative action. The difficulty in understanding why the simple pus cell should be arrested, and yet the white blood cell pass through the capillaries, is so great, that it is highly probable, in many cases at least, some other condition must be pre- sent to account for the phlebitic phenomena. This leads me to say a few words on the pathology of phlebitis, a subject particularly interesting at the present time, in con- sequence of the researches of Virchow, and which have had for their result, some most valuable observations regarding it.
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