Selected monographs.

Date:: 1888

Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Selected monographs. Source: Wellcome Collection.

132/440 (page 116)

01' anatomical, could be drawn between chronic interstitial pneumonia or cirrhosis of the lung and other forms of chronic pneumonia/' for these conditions are precisely anala- gous to those of the chronic aifections of the kidney. Among the vast number of forms of chronic pneumonia, there is one which clinically stands out so sharply from all the others, that every experienced physician immediately recognises in it the typical cirrhosis of the lung which, since Corrigan's classical description, has been and still is, unhesitatingly regarded as a peculiar form. And need I say that there are other forms of chronic pneumonia,'^ whose symptoms differ from this latter type, as widely as day does from night, so that the two cannot be confounded together ? or need I say that between these typical forms, placed as they are at each extremity of the large series of chronic pneumonias, there exist an innumerable number of cases representing very gradual stages of transition from the one to the other, in such a manner as to prevent any definition of an exact limit to the series ? And is the case different in an anatomical point of view ? No anatomist will have any hesitation in recog- nising a typical cirrhosis of the lung, set up perhaps as a result of pleuritis or of some disease due to inhalation of irritating dust, and in distinguishing it from other chronic forms of inflammation of the lung, notwithstanding the numerous imperceptible transitions from the latter to the former and vice versa, and in spite of the fact that a really pure interstitial pneumonia as little exists as a pure, ex- clusively interstitial nephritis. Neither in cirrhosis of the lungs, of the kidneys, or of any other organ is the morbid process confined exclusively to the interstitial tissue, nor in the other chronic inflammations is the so-called paren- chyma alone involved and the connective-tissue framework unaffected. It would be difficult to imagine that any such exemptions exist in the living body, in which no system of the elementary tissues is separated from its neighbour by an impenetrable wall. We are scarcely able in all cases of chronic pneumonia even to determine which system forms the startmg- point of the disease, and there is just the same difficulty m many cases of chronic nephritis. The important pomt is to determine the predominant factor in the morbid process, what