Contributions to the physiology and pathology of the breast and its lymphatic glands / by Charles Creighton.

  • Charles Creighton
Date:
1886
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Contributions to the physiology and pathology of the breast and its lymphatic glands / by Charles Creighton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    131/262 (page 111)
    Ch. v.] of the MAMMAE7 FUNCTION. ' HI so obviously uncertain that one'is entitled to dismiss altogether the teleological idea of a secretion, and to consider the activity of the organ rather as being correlated to that of the other sexual organs, and ultimately to the season of the year. The full expan- sion of the organ is found only in the specimens procured about the month of December; Mr Bennett's specimens shot in August had the gland in the state of extreme contraction, and it is generally found in that condition in the specimens that are sent to this country. The gland in its contracted state has perhaps less than one- tenth the volume of the state of full expansion. The hundred or more independent follicles of which it consists are small oat-shaped bodies of a brown colour, about four or five lines long, and a line in •breadth at their middle. They are arranged in the form of a fan, with their necks converging to a narrow linear space under the skin about one-quarter of an inch in length. At that point there is an ill-defined break in the panniculus carnosus, and the necks, or rather the upper pointed ends, of the follicles appear to lose them- selves in the subcutaneous tissue. When the fur which covers that region—equally with the surrounding skin—is completely scraped off, the skin to which the follicles converge shows, under a lens, no obvious differences from the rest of the skin. The mouths of ducts cannot be detected, nor any other openings than those of the hair-follicles. In microscopic sections through the whole thickness of skin and through the length of the attached follicles as well, no passages resembling ducts are found traversing the skin to its surface. I have made sections of the involuted gland in a direction exactly perpendicular to the skin, throughout almost the whole region where the follicles were attached. The collected ends of the follicles, owing to their brown colour, could be seen, with the naked eye, to end in the corium like a rounded papilla, the follicles in the centre of the convexity coming nearest to the surface. Under the microscope I could trace no obvious communication with the skin from any one of the numerous follicles that the section encountered. Ducts with an epithelial lining could hardly have escaped notice, although the gland, from long keeping in spirit, did not afford very reliable histological appearances. So far as the follicles of the shrunken or involuted gland are concerned^ they appear simply to end in the corium