Contributions to the physiology and pathology of the breast and its lymphatic glands / by Charles Creighton. With illustrations.

  • Charles Creighton
Date:
1878
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Contributions to the physiology and pathology of the breast and its lymphatic glands / by Charles Creighton. With illustrations. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

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    has been found to be as much as three-quarters of an inch in thickness, while the gland-tissue formed, as it were, a mere covering drawn over it. The cushion of fat is also observed to contain small lymphatic glands embedded in it. On cutting into the gland thus reduced in thickness, its substance is found to be tough, and to consist of large tracts of not very dense fibrous tissue, interposed between small round or linear areas of the in- voluted glandular tissue. The latter have the usual colour and the soft or parenchymatous section of glandular substance, and in the plane of section they incline to stand out slightly above the level of the fibrous stroma. In the greatly flattened or spread- out kinds of glands, as in the dog, cat, and rabbit, the longi- tudinal section has a stratified appearance, from the arrangement of several involuted lobuli in a long narrow strip, with correspond- ing parallel tracts of connective tissue. In the more compact glands of the sheep and guinea-pig, the islands of glandular tissue are more uniformly scattered over the plane of section. It some- times happens that the tracts of connective tissue between the lobules are occupied by fat. Where this is the case, the contrast between the true glandular and the other tissue is very marked, and the stratified or mottled appearance more striking. The glandular tissue might be estimated roughly to make up less than one-half of the entire bulk of the organ. The section of the in- voluted gland shows also numerous large ducts and blood-vessels cut across. On microscopic examination the ducts and blood-vessels are always conspicuous. In sections of the fully-expanded glands they are seldom encountered; but the great retraction of the glandular substance in the involuted state enables them to become prominent. The fibrous tissue, as has been stated, is sometimes occupied by fat. In most cases, however, the tissue between the lobules is purely fibrillar or coarse fibrous, and the greater or less amount of fat seems to follow the individual peculiarities of the animal. The most striking instance of fat formation occurred in a rabbit. A portion of the mamma, four days after the young were taken away, was found to have the uniform parenchymatous appearance of the fully expanded gland. When the animal was killed ten days later, the glandular tissue was found to be greatly retracted or involuted, and the involuted lobuli or groups of lobuli
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