Lectures on the principles and practice of physic; delivered at King's College, London / by Thomas Watson.
- Sir Thomas Watson, 1st Baronet
- Date:
- 1847
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Lectures on the principles and practice of physic; delivered at King's College, London / by Thomas Watson. Source: Wellcome Collection.
43/1084 page 37
![is believed to be a good deal concerned; then we know, by experience, that the privation of light has the effect of blanching animals as well as vegetables, and thus further interferes with the due renovation of the blood. In this way, the trans¬ formation of the liver into a fatty mass has been sometimes attempted to be explained. To what extent the explanation is correct, I will not pretend to say: but it is worth remarking that the fatty liver is very frequently met with in persons who die of con¬ sumption ; and in that disease there are various causes in operation tending to modify the constitution of the blood. The history of these unfortunate fowls is not barren of instruction in respect to the more limited bad effects of full diet, want of exercise, and a short allowance of day-light, upon the “ featherless biped” man. These accumulations of fat are morbid changes. The transformations that are effected in false joints are evidently methods of accommodation and repair. The same may be said of the transformation—which is not conversion—of areolar tissue into synovial membrane. Synovial membrane consists chiefly of condensed areolar tissue. Sir B. Brodie, in his book on Diseases of the Joints, gives instances of synovial membranes being formed, where none before existed. “In a youno- ladv who had attained the age of ten or twelve years, labouring under the inconvenience of a club-foot, a large bursa was distinctly to be felt on that part of the instep which came in contact with the ground in walking. In another young lady, who had apparently recovered of a caries of the spine, attended with a considerable angular curvature, a bursa appeared to have been formed between the projecting spinous process and the skin.” ° In like manner we find that sinuses, fistulous openings and tubes, in various parts, become lined, through the intervention of the areolar tissue, with a surface which in its appearance and in its properties resembles the mucous membranes. Like them it is with difficulty made to take on adhesive inflammation : and therefore it is that sinuses of this kind, and chronic abscesses, are often so troublesome to the surgeon, and require to be laid open before they can be abolished. On the other hand, the mucous membranes, under peculiar circumstances, approximate to the skin in their physical aspect and qualities. When, for instance] a portion of the mucous lining of the rectum, or of the vagina, protrudes externally, is permanently exposed to the air, and subject to the friction of clothes or of neicffi- bouring parts that is to say, when it is placed under the same conditions as die skin —it assumes somewhat the characters of the skin: it gradually loses its red colour and approaches the tint of the skin, ceases to pour forth mucus, becomes dry, obtains even a sort of permanent cuticle, acquires firmness and density, and is less sensible to the contact and pressure of foreign substances. It is impossible not to perceive the beneficial nature of this transformation. The greater number, then, of those interesting changes in the living body which have been classed under the head of transformations of tissue, have a restorative tendency They exemplify the working of what the older pathologists discerned, and called the vis meclicatrix naturae. This is a phrase that has been much sneered at; but (as I conceive) very unjustly, and sometimes ignorantly. It is simply a short formulary expressive of a great general truth, viz., that the'animal frame is so constituted as to contain within itself the elements of repair, and of conservative adap¬ tation. To a certain extent it is a self-mending machine. Surely this is an admirable provision, and clearly indicative both of wise contrivance and of beneficent desio-n. ihe intimate texture of parts may be further altered—not simply by some modi- * hcation or reconstruction of the ordinary tissues, but—by an absolute disappearance or confusion of all regular structure. This is usually a consequence either of the effusion, in the natural interstices of the parts, of fluids, which afterwards pass into m 1° ■ ,sta‘e’or 11 a consequence of the growth of solids which do not belong to the healthy body. In this sketch of general pathology I must content myself with thus briefly alluding to this source of morbid change. I may as well observe here, that the alterations with which we have hitherto been occupied, of the solids of the body, fall, almost all of them, under the head of lesions of nutrition, as the French pathologists speak. That is to say, they com- D](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b29308938_0043.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
