Selected monographs.

Date:: 1888

Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Selected monographs. Source: Wellcome Collection.

262/440 (page 244)

Thus during life the kidneys remain almost immoveahly fixed. Even deep inspiration does not depress them, although they lie against the crura of the diaphragm, to a great extent above the lowest limit of the pleural cavity. Under these circumstances, as is shown by experiments on animals as well as by palpation in suitable cases in human beings, the most that occurs is a slight rotation of their upper part forwards round their transverse axis. I have searched in vain in the physiological handbooks for any note on this point, in Pansch alone I found a short remark to the same effect as that just made. IV. Statistics. Notwithstanding the numerous publications mentioned above, moveable kidney is a complaint still often overlooked or wrongly interpreted, and of far more frequent occurrence than is generally imagined. Since, moreover, as I shall show, many maladies which are really secondary results of moveable kidney are imagined and described as diseases sui generis, statistics never so carefully prepared cannot fail to be affected by many sources of error. Although, however, they do not for this reason permit us to draw final conclu- sions as to the frequency of moveable kidney, other infer- ences deduced from them as to its mode of production are nevertheless valuable, and I therefore append a short collection of cases in point, of which I have personally observed 42. The complaint has been most frequently observed in patients between 30 and 40 years of age, as is shown by the following data :