Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Outlines of human pathology / by Herbert Mayo. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.
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![existence of prostatic abscess is often first discovered through the sudden discharge of pus with the urine. The complaint is to be suspected when inflammation of the gland continues obstinate: examination by the rectum will often decide its presence; and even when its presence is uncertain, if there is much constitutional disturbance, with rigor, and fulness and pain about the prostate, a lancet should be plunged deep into the perineum to endeavour to give vent by a harmless channel to the pus. Cases of abscess of the prostate in young men and adults are of not unfrequent occurrence—they are rare in old age and in infancy. Sir Benjamin Brodie mentions three cases of the former class, where the disease was combined with chronic enlargement. An infant, two years of age, came under my own care, with retention of urine, which required the repeated use of the catheter. The catheter when intro- duced sometimes drew off pus, at other times urine; by care in the management of the instrument the bladder, however, could always be relieved. The infant died, and a large ab- scess of the prostate was found opening into the urethra by a considerable orifice, into which the catheter had passed on those occasions when matter flowed instead of urine. 4. Ulceration of the vesical surface of the prostate is an occasional attendant upon chronic enlargement; it greatly aggravates the patient's sufferings, causing the most agoniz- ing pain when the bladder acts. 5. Hypertrophy, or chronic enlargement of the prostate, is a change to which the part is liable, when the frame is beginning to feel the effects of age. [:r. 119. 120.] The enlargement in general is unattended with alteration of texture; sometimes the gland is softer than usual, some- times in parts it is remarkably hard; it never, I imagine^ becomes carcinomatous. The enlargement occupies either both lateral lobes equally, or one more than the other, or the third lobe less or more than either. The enlargement varies from a trifling increase of bulk to twenty times the natural size of the gland. The sufFerino' which attends the disease is from retention of urine, and is at first the mechanical distress of the bladder and](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21066735_0583.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
