Family tendency to hypertrophic cirrhosis of the liver (Hanot's disease) / by James Finlayson.

  • James Finlayson
Date:
[1899]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Family tendency to hypertrophic cirrhosis of the liver (Hanot's disease) / by James Finlayson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    abdomen, the splenic tumour was more striking than the enlarged liver. No glandular swellings were detected, and there was no alcoholic history. She weighed 7 st. 11 lbs. An examination of the blood was made by Dr. Carstairs Douglas during the lad’s residence in 1898, and again when he returned with his sister. No increase of the white blood corpuscles existed in either case; indeed, some of the esti- mates made them less than the normal. The number of the red blood corpuscles was about the normal in both patients, and the haemoglobin was not much below par. This discovery of a second member in the family being affected led Dr. Muir to examine some of the other members of the same family, and he reported that a third member, a younger brother, was also found to have a large liver and spleen. Dr. Muir supplied the following notes of this lad:— Age, 15 years: affected for 18 months; jaundice slight; itching occasional; bleeding from nose sometimes; liver large, extending 3 inches below the ribs; spleen enlarged, extending 3| inches below the ribs: no history of alcohol. Another brother, still younger, seems a little yellow, but no enlarge- ment of liver or spleen can be detected in his case. Three members of a family similarly affected with a con- dition relatively rare in early life led to a search into the literature of cirrhosis of the liver, especially as regards young subjects or family proclivity. The little memoir of Hanot does not indicate any experience of family tendency in this disease, although he refers to the subjects being weakly and poorly developed (p. 99). In Osier’s Practice of Medicine, third edition, 1898, p. 574, the writer states, under the heading of “ Hypertrophic Cirrhosis,” that two of the cases he had seen were in brothers. In the Intel'national Journal of the Medical Sciences (Oct., 1887, p. 350), in an article on “Hepatic Cirrhosis in Children,” Dr. R. P. Howard gives the case of a girl, 9 years old in 1878, affected with a large liver and spleen, with a history of epistaxis, slight pyrexia, and latterly ascites. Her brother became icteric in 1884; he also had enlargement of the liver and spleen, and he also had slight pyrexia and ascites.
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