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.

    188/262 (page 168)
    the miscroscopic examination, it must be considered to be an intra-acinous formation occurring in a small and isolated portion of the gland. The whole breast was removed in the operation, and the bulk of it, which remained hard and dense after lying in spirit, was made up of close tendon-like bundles of fibrous tissue, with very few traces of epithelial tubes scattered through it at wide intervals. Both in the density of its stroma and in the reduction of its secretory framework, the tissue beside the tumour may be considered to represent the usual condition of the breast in women after the climacteric period. It is at that period of life that the intensely hard tumours of the breast are apt to occur, and the peculiar hardness is probably owing to the nature of the stroma in which the cells, or active elements of the tumour, lie'. The pre- sent case is an instance of a mammary tumour appearing late in life, but occurring in the form of greatly enlarged acini of the gland. In no other part of the organ was there any appearance of a surviving cluster of acini, or even of the infundibula of ducts. The glandular apparatus had disappeared, except at the point where the morbid action had established itself I have already referred to the climacteric changes of the breast, although I have not had an opportunity of following them closely; and I observed that the post-climacteric tumours of the mamma were to be con- sidered as morbid growths incidental to the process of effacement of the secreting structure and to the final withdrawal of the secre- tory force. From that point of view, the origin of the present tumour would be looked for in the survival of some outlying part of the structure, and the correlated persistence of a func- tional force, while all the rest of the organ had become obsolete. Fig. 26 is from another case in a woman beyond the climacteric period, the patient's age being 58; it was removed on the same day as the tumour just mentioned, and it offers several points of contrast. The growth was more centrally disposed beneath the nipple, and had not so definite boundaries. A considerable pro- ^ Thus we are told that soirrhus is marked and distingished by its fibrous character: whereas the fibrous appearance, in a great degree, belongs to the normal condition of the organ, and is not a product of the disease; Many other equally erroneous statements might be mentioned, and for this reason I felt that it was absolutely necessary to give an account of the natural structure of the breast, before its morbid changes could be properly explained or understood.—Astley Cooper, Introduction to Aiiatoviy of the Breast.