A note on the histology of sterile incubated cancerous and healthy tissues / by Samuel G. Shattock and Charles A. Ballance.

  • Shattock, Samuel George.
Date:
[1888]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A note on the histology of sterile incubated cancerous and healthy tissues / by Samuel G. Shattock and Charles A. Ballance. 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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    of the real import of these remarkable appearances in cancer, we cannot help thinking that they may have an intimate bearing on the local and general infective processes of the disease. We are acquainted with the disintegration into irregular masses of the nuclear substance which occurs in conditions of acute inflammatory necrosis, as seen in glanders, or such as is observed in the nuclei of pus-cells, or in portions of new growths in which degenerative softening has occurred, or when a tissue is subjected to unequal and excessive heating. In the cutaneous lesions of glanders more particularly, we have observed the nuclei of the leucocytes remarkably irregular in form, divided into flask-shaped processes, mostly of relatively large size, which become detached and are found free in the surrounding tissue. The process we have described in cancer has not, as compared with the above-mentioned cases, the appearance of being a passive cleavage or division of the nucleus ; in the epithelial cells especially the outline of the nucleus remains quite distinct and sharp, whilst the chromatic substance projects beyond.1 The possibility of these changes having an artificial production is of course not to be ignored, such as is known to obtain in the extrusion of the nucleus from the newt’s blood-corpuscle under the influence of certain chemical agents, of the protagon from medullated nerve-fibres, and the like. There are, however, among living processes some with which they bear comparison. One of these is the series of changes which takes place in the ovum independently of and preparatory to fertilisation. In the maturation of the ovum there occurs an extrusion of the nuclear chromatin, with portion of the protoplasm from the cell beneath the vitelline membrane, the extruding part constituting one of the polar globules; by a repetition of this process a second globule may be extruded. The extrusion is not, according to the latest views, preceded by an ordinary karyo-kinetic process. The nucleus of the ovum, in which now no nucleoplasmic network is visible, remains as the female pronucleus, and the cell in this state is ready on fertilisation to undergo the segmentation involved in the production of an embryo. In explanation of the extension of the polar globules, Balfour has advanced the hypothesis that the 1 Our impression is that the process occurs before the death of the tissue elements, i. e. within a comparatively short period after the removal of the tumour.
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