Appendicitis and perityphlitis / by Charles Talamon ; translated by E.P. Hurd.

  • Talamon, Charles, 1850-
Date:
1893
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Appendicitis and perityphlitis / by Charles Talamon ; translated by E.P. Hurd. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    mation of the interna] membrane to the external coat of the caecum and the surrounding parts. 4. Chronic typhlitis, whose accidents present themselves under the aspect of an affection with slow and prolonged course.' Although this conception of Albers ultimately became cur- rent, and has continued to be so till the last few years, it met with determined opponents, one of whom was Grisolle. Even in the last edition of his treatise on Internal Pathology, this writer did not once use the name of typhlitis. Albers' disease was non-existent for him. He knew only the perforations of the ileo-caecal appendix and the phlegmons of the iliac fossa. He did not understand how simple inflammation of the mucous membrane of the caecum could have the grave consequences attributed to it, when ulcerous inflammation of the same mucosa, even when it causes deep and multiple losses of sub- stance as in typhoid fever or dysentery, shows no tendency to invade the surrounding cellular tissue. The stercoral typhlitis of Albers. none the less gradually won acceptance. It became the custom to refer inflammations of the iliac fossa to faecal engorgement of the caecum, and its consequences. All the treatises on the practice of medicine, one after another recognized under the name of typhlitis, an inflammation localized in the first part of the large intestine, which might terminate by resolution or by perforation, the perforation of the posterior part giving rise to a perityphlitis with abscess of the neighboring cellular tissue, perforation of the anterior part causing peritonitis. In point of fact, the notion of Albers is purely theoretical. It lacks the only serious and certain criterium which the path- ologist can demand, the proof furnished by pathological an- atomy. Mo one has ever seen on the cadaver either simple typhlitis or stercoral typhlitis. When, in cases where such a diagnosis has been made, the patients succumb, one invariably finds at the autopsy, either a perforation of the appendix, or a pericecal abscess, or a peritonitis, but never a simple and isolated inflammation of the caecum. The writers who have defended this view have only succeeded in justifying it by 1 Albers, Beobachtungen auf dem Gebiete der Path, und Path. Anat. Bonn 1838 and Journal 1' Experience 1839, p. 129.