Clinical lectures: on scrofulous neck, by T.C. Allbutt; and on the surgery of scrofulous glands / / by T.P. Teale.

  • Thomas Clifford Allbutt
Date:
1885
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Clinical lectures: on scrofulous neck, by T.C. Allbutt; and on the surgery of scrofulous glands / / by T.P. Teale. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    ON THE SURGERY OF SCROFULOUS GLANDS. Few subjects better illustrate the increasing tendency in modern times of the work of the physician and of the surgeon to be drawn to a focus of common action than that of scrofulous glands. The definite principles on which the surgeon attacks degenerating and suppurating glands when- ever within reach have taken form within very recent years, and have derived their impetus mainly from two lines of thought — one, the fundamental one, established by the physician, that such degenerate structures, even when not suppurating, are centres from which health-damaging and death - dealing material may be diffused throughout the human frame; the other, established by the surgeon, that septic suppurating cavities and sinuses can be deprived of their injurious qualities, and converted from chronic sores into rapidly healing surfaces, by the vigorous employment of the scraper invented by Volckmann and improved by Lister, which enables him to achieve work which cannot be so thoroughly or easily effected by the knife. It was a happy arrangement by which this course of clinical lectures by the consulting staff of the Leeds Infirmary was inaugurated by a lecture on the physician’s side of the question, and is followed by a complementary lecture on its surgical aspect. And this sequence is all the more marked, inasmuch as a great portion of the surgical work on which my lecture is based, has been done at the request of Dr. Allbutt, in order to satisfy his cravings as a physician for the riddance by surgery of those poisonous structures which barred the way to the successful treatment of his patients. The data which I shall bring before you are drawn chiefly from my private practice, and for this reason, that I have been able to watch the cases thoroughly from beginning to end, and to obtain more accurate statements of the results B