Pre-appendicectomy appendictis : its bearing on causation and treatment / by J. Foster Palmer.

  • Palmer, J. Foster (James Foster)
Date:
[1905]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Pre-appendicectomy appendictis : its bearing on causation and treatment / by J. Foster Palmer. 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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    considered to be, not constipation, but the formation of concretions. His paper contains the only positive evidence I can find as to recovery from attacks of appendicitis, and this is a useful one. He says that in persons dying of other diseases traces of old inflammation of the appendix are often found.* In the British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review for January, i860, Dr. Leudet gives eighteen cases of ulceration of the appendix occurring in his own practice, and considers phthisis to be the most frequent cause. In thirteen cases of perforation he also found that phthisis existed in six.f In the New Sydenham Society's Year Book for the same year (i860; are also mentioned two cases of intussusception in which the entire caecum, including the appendix, was invaginated. One was fatal. The caecum and appendix were inflamed and gangrenous, and blocked up the ileo-caecal aperture. In the other the caecum and appendix sloughed off and passed by the rectum, and the patient recovered. A case of perforation of the appendix is also quoted from Schmidt’s Jahrbiicher (Drs. Traube and Munk). In Holmes’s System of Surgery, written in i860, Mr. Pollock speaks, rather vaguely, of fruit stones being apt to become lodged in the appendix, and to be the cause of much irritation and even trouble- some obstruction. At the same time he urges early operation in all cases where life is threatened by obstruction, and minimises the danger of cutting the peritoneum, which was a great bugbear among surgeons at that time. Mr. Moore, in his clinical lectures at the Middlesex Hospital in 1864, gives a case of abscess of the appendix which was opened, letting out air and pus. After this the patient passed by the rectum a large number of currants, which were extremely offensive, and presumably in a state of decomposition. He describes six other cases, all fatal; also one of acute abscess and peritonitis, the result of a cherry stone in the appendix, and another in which a long continued fecal discharge from an opening in a greatly swelled scrotum was found to come from a perforated appendix contained in a hernia.J At a meeting of the Pathological Society in November, 1876, Dr. Thorowgood related a case in which the appendix had been removed by an incision in the back. At the same meeting Dr. Murchison stated that he had seen a case of appendicitis from an impacted plum stone, and another in which a swan-shot in the appendix had formed the * New Sydenham Society's Year Book of Medicine and Surgery for 1859, p. 243. f Ibid, for i860, p. 227. % Lancet, 1864, vol. ii., p. 512.
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