Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: The rectum and anus : their diseases and treatment. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.
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![the early stages the tissue was soft, as if from recent inflammation, effusion^ or oedema; but as the infiltra- tion organised, it became callous, with fusion of the mucous and submucous coats, and then contracting, thus brought al)Out a state of stricture. On the mucous membrane of all parts of tlie colon there were ulcers of regular (round or oval) shape from a sixth of an inch to about two-thirds of an inch in diameter, with clean, sharp-cut, scarcely thickened edges, surrounded by healthy or only too vascular mucous membrane. Their bases were, for the most part, level, or with low granu- lations resting on the submucous tissue, nowhere pene- trating to the muscular coat, with no marked sub- jacent thickening or hardening. On some of them were ramifying blood-vessels ; on some few there was at the centre of the base a small island of mucous membrane, giving to the ulcer an evident likeness to the annular syphilitic ulcers of the skin. At some plaices two or more of these ulcers coalesced into a large ulcer of irregular shape, and rather deeper than the smaller ones, but in all general characters similar to them. By such coalescence, some of the ulcers in the lower part of the colon were continuous with the ulcerated surface of the rectum, making it ])robable that, at first, similar forms of ulcers may have existed in the rectum, though now superadded thickening and partial scarring had destroyed nearly all traces of any primary shapes of ulcer. The ulcers of the colon were placed without plan or grouping, except that they decreased in number and closeness, and, on the whole, in size also, from the rectum to the c?ecum. In the caecum there were none ; in the ileum only one, very small, and of rather doubtful character. Extensive amyloid deg:eneratioii of the rectum, in common with that of the rest of the intes- tinal tract, is frequent in old-standing cases of ex- tensive syphilis; but this condition is not of much](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21229387_0209.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
