Senile hypertrophy and senile atrophy of the skull / by George Murray Humphry.

  • George Murray Humphry
Date:
1890
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Senile hypertrophy and senile atrophy of the skull / by George Murray Humphry. 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.

    13/20 page 335
    that the canals for the meningeal vessels are nearer the ex- ternal surface than is normal; and these canals are often deepened internally by some bony deposit which extends more or less over the whole of the interior of the skull; and, in the specimen represented in PI. IV, fig. 4, as already noticed, they have, by virtue of the absorption on their exterior and deposition on their interior, come to be on the outer surface of the thin layer which remains at the bottom of the depressions ; and they are seen passing on it to the thicker edges at the margins of the depressions, where they disappear. These canals are quite as large and abundant as usual, or more so ; there is therefore no evi- dence of diminution of vascularity at the parts affected or elsewhere. It is further to be observed that the absorption or atrophy which produces these depressions may be associated in the same skull with the opposite, viz., thickening and conden- sation or hypertrophy. One of the specimens in the Cam- bridge Museum, a calvaria which I took from a woman, aged 73, who died of apoplexy, is very thick, half an inch in the frontal part, also dense and heavy, weighing 18 oz. The thickening is evidently due to bone-formation on the interior which, especially in the frontal region, is remark- ably uneven, knotty, and craggy. The parietal depressions, which occupy the usual position and present the usual features, have not reached the internal table because it has receded from them ; and the skull-wall at their deep- est part has about the normal thickness and more than the usual density. In the specimen from the woman, aged 90 (PI. IV, fig. 4), where the depressions are so large, the frontal bone is denser than usual and is thickened with hard knots or tubercles on the interior ; and there is similar de- posit in the vicinity of the depressions, though the depres- sions themselves are free from it. I have been much puzzled to account for these remark- able and symmetrical parietal depressions—these freaks, as it were, of senile process. That they are the result, not, as I once thought possible, of some congenital defect, but
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image