Lectures on diabetes : including the Bradshawe lecture delivered before the Royal College of Physicians on August 18th, 1890 / by Robert Suandby.

Date:
1891
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Lectures on diabetes : including the Bradshawe lecture delivered before the Royal College of Physicians on August 18th, 1890 / by Robert Suandby. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    which it was hard it was also enlarged. So far as my own observations go, I am disposed to agree with Lancereaux, as I have found the pancreas shrunken in all my cases of typical wasting diabetes. That the pancreas stands in some relation to diabetes is shewn by the experience of Bull, of New York, whose patient died of diabetes after he had extirpated the pancreas. Duffey has published a case of diabetes associated with cancer of the pancreas; on the other hand, in the cases of pancreatic disease collected by Dr. Handfield Jones, and more recently by another distinguished Fellow of this College, Dr. Norman Moore, there is no mention of diabetes. [Dr. Baumel, in a paper published in the Montpellier Medical for 1881-82 was the first to con- tend that disease of the pancreas was the regular cause of diabetes, and in the same communication he recorded a case of diabetes without emaciation (diabete gras) in which this association existed. To him, therefore, belongs by right any honour that is due to the writer who first distinctly recognised the full significance of the pancre- atic lesion in diabetes. In a recent article (August 2nd, 1890) the editor of the Philadelphia Medical News refers to a case of cystic disease of the pancreas from a case of diabetes exhibited by Longstreth in 1877, and to one of multiple pancreatic abscesses with glycosuria reported by Frison in 1875 ; on the other hand, he states that Langenhans has recently published a case of necrosis of the pancreas in which there was no sugar in the urine.] Cyr thinks the atrophy is secondary, and only a result of the general failure of nutrition. Ligature of the duct, and even extirpation of the gland, have not always been followed by diabetes; but the force of this objection is removed by the observation that a small part of the pancreas, if left behind, is capable of supplying the necessary ferment (?). Various theories have been put forward to account for the action of the pancreas.