Beri-beri : researches concerning its nature and cause and the means of its arrest, made by order of the Netherlands government / by C.A. Pekelharing ... and C. Winkler ... Tr. by James Cantlie.

  • Cornelis Adrianus Pekelharing
Date:
[1893]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Beri-beri : researches concerning its nature and cause and the means of its arrest, made by order of the Netherlands government / by C.A. Pekelharing ... and C. Winkler ... Tr. by James Cantlie. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    sheath. These fibrils, often of a pale rose colour, lose themselves in the frothy mass which fills the fusiform thickenings. An uncoloured cone limits the frothy mass on each side, and it is there that the fibrillar structure of the contents, emptied of all else, is best shown. The number of nuclei has greatly augmented: they are met with at regular intervals. There are all sorts of transitions between the phase of degeneration masses first described and the phase of frothy degeneration of which we have just spoken. Some- times, especially in atrophic forms, the phase of frothy degene- ration is the only condition observed (Plate II., figs. 6 and 7); but then some signs of regeneration are already found, of which we are about to speak. It would be a great mistake to suppose that nothing more than the above mentioned changes are to be made out in a specimen stained by osmic acid; closer observation shows many other pathological points worthy of note. Almost at the first glance at the specimen, the attention is arrested by numerous fibres of extreme delicacy. The minute size of the fibres has, of course, but little to do with arriving at the conclusion that a r.-jrve is degenerate; as, even after great experience, one may be misled were one to pronounce disease of a nerve to exist from that evidence alone. But it is otherwise when one sees this thinning confined to some parts of a fibre, or when thin and thick segments alternate (Plate II., figs. 8, 9,10), or when one finds so large an increase of nuclei, as is the case, for example, in Plate II., fig. 7. These attest, no doubt, the presence of an attempt at regeneration in the nerve. We ought to refer here to the figures that Gombault1 has given, when he described his periaxile segmentary neuritis. The thin segments— interposed segments;)—have also been found by Renaut2 in the nerves in their normal state amongst animals possessing solid hoofs. The fine segment is generally separated from the thicker by two of Eanvier's nodes. There is always found in the middle of the interposed segment an inter- 1 Gomliault. Archives de neurologic, 1880. Contribution a l'etude anatomique de la nevrite ]iareuchymateuse. Nevrite segmentaire periaxile, p. 11 and p. 178. Compare tigs. 13, 18, and 1, 2 and 7. 3 Renaut. Archives de physiologic normale et pathologique. Recherehes sur quelques points particuliers de l'histologie des nerfs, p. 161, 1881. F
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