Mollities ossium : (malakosteon, osteo-malacia, osteo-sarcosis, Knochen-Erweichung, rachitismus adultorum, rickets, or softening of the bones in the adult) / by Joseph Jones.

  • Joseph Jones
Date:
1869
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Mollities ossium : (malakosteon, osteo-malacia, osteo-sarcosis, Knochen-Erweichung, rachitismus adultorum, rickets, or softening of the bones in the adult) / by Joseph Jones. 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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    bent like whalebone. The femur was rather a fleshy body than a bone; its cavity was filled with a reddish suet, instead of marrow, which accumulated in different points, and bulged out the fleshy sides. The capacity of the pelvis was much diminished; the bones that composed it were softened, thickened, and contracted. The spine kept its natural form; the vertebrm soft and supple. The sternum and all the cellular bones seemed solid, but could bend, and were easily cut. The ribs, though softened, were still friable. Some of them, towards the sternum, were doubled over each other. The clavicles seemed almost cartilaginous. The shoulder-blades were much thicker than natural, less broad, and entirely disfigured. The two protuberances called acromion and coracoides, almost joined. The skull bones were easily cut in slices, and were twice as thick as in their natural state. Both plates were joined in one, and no traces at all of a diploe. Their substance abounded with an extremely diluted serum, easily squeezed out by a gentle pressure of the fingers. The sutures almost obliterated; the bones of the basis and face shared in the calamity. The teeth hard as usual. The dura mater was incorpo- rated with the bones. The brain not softer than ordinary; its right'hemisphere was by one-third larger than the left, and hence, perhaps, the weakness of her left side, often manifested by pains, aches, defluxions, heaviness, falls on that side, and every illness which she had from her infancy, beginning in some part of it. When young, she fell on her head down two pairs of stairs. The membranes that separate the two hemispheres of the brain were much thicker than common. In fine, all her bones were so soft that the scalpel, with very little force, ran through the hardest of them, even the rocky apophysis of the ear bone, so called from its excessive hardness. Nothing extraordinary was found in the viscera; but their size diminished by the compression, and a universal cachexy. There could be no cause assigned of this woman’s disorder, as she gave no signs plain enough to prove either a scurvy, pox, or king’s-evil, either hereditary or acquired; her parentshaving lived healthy, the one to the age of eighty, and her mother being then alive aged sixty, and in good health. She had three children, who died of disorders common to their age; one, four years old, died of the measles. In the following case of Mary Hays, reported by John Tringle,
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