Selected monographs.

Date:: 1888

Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Selected monographs. Source: Wellcome Collection.

230/440 (page 212)

cases tliese certainly could not be referred to any affection of the elliptical patches of Peyer. In one case in which they were not visible, the bowels are stated to have been rather loosCj the stools watery and dark coloured. In other two cases there was considerable abdominal tenderness, without diarrhoea. I shall preface with a few remarks the two following and concluding tables, which give the results of my own observa- tion. They refer to twenty-two inspections,—but a small number, it is true, yet made with as great care and attention to accuracy as I could bestow on them. The solution of the interesting question. Is there any connection between the abdominal symptoms during life, and the state of the intes- tinal follicles in typhus? may be attempted iu different ways. We may compare the symptoms, whether positive or negative, with the mucous follicles, as regards (i) their number, and (2) their degree of development. And after having, as far as our data enable us, determined these points, we must not be unmindful of the objections that may be urged, as, for instance, that our terms are vague; that our cases are too few to draw conclusions from; that absorption of morbid matter may have taken place before death, or, it may be, that death has arrived before its deposition was possible. I shall meet some of these objections beforehand. The cases, I acknowledge, are few, but I maintain that they are a fair sample of hundreds that occur yearly, and at the same time direct attention to the numerous facts I have already cited. To take away all vagueness from the terms I employ, I make the followmg statements respecting the state of the intestinal follicles. It was very rare, in the cases of typhus which I either in- spected or saw inspected, during a two years' residence m Glasgow Infirmary, to see these glands elevated a quarter of a line above the surrounding mucous membrane, and m the vast majority it was very difficult to determine whether they were really elevated or not, the slight roughening or irregularity of their surface often causing a visual deception. When, therefore, we speak of the elevation of the aggregate glands in typhus we arc no longer occupied, as m typhoid fever, in the measurement of palpable magnitudes, but_ for the most part with elevations, which French pathologists.