Lectures on the comparative anatomy of the placenta : first series delivered before the Royal College of Surgeons of England, June, 1875 / by Wm. Turner.

Date:
1876
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Lectures on the comparative anatomy of the placenta : first series delivered before the Royal College of Surgeons of England, June, 1875 / by Wm. Turner. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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

    119/144 (page 115)
    PHYSIOLOGICAL EEMARKS. l l-'> ployed in the nutrition of the fuetus, has from time to time been definitely stated by various physiologists. The immortal Harvey distinctly recognised that the placenta prepared for the foetus alimentary matters derived from the mother. In the deer, he says, the maternal cotyledons are of a spongy clmracter, and constituted, like a honey-comb, of innumerable shallow pits filled with a inuco-albummous fluid (a circumstance already observed by Galen), and that from this source the ramifications of the umbilical vessels absorbed the nutriment and carried it to the foetus; just as, in animals after their birth, tlie extremities of the mesenteric vessels are_^spread over the coats of the intestines, and thence take up chyle. And again: In my opinion the placenta and carunculse have an office analo- gous to that of the Uver and mamma. The liver elaborates for the nourishment of the body the chyle previously taken up from the intestines : the placenta in like manner prepares for the foetus ali- mentary matters which have come from the mother. The mammse also, which are of a glandular structure, swell with milk, and although in some animals they are not even visible at other times they become full and tumid at the period of pregnancy ; so too, the placenta, a loose and fungus-like body, abounds in an albuminous fluid, and is only to be foimd at the period of ])regriancy. The liver, I say then, is the nutrient organ of the body in which it is found; the mamma is the same of the infant, and the placenta of the embryo', Needham also^ wrote of the nutritious juice formed in the cotyledons of the Rumincmtia. Wharton and Haller applied^ to this fluid the name of milk or milky humor; by several sub- sequent writers it has been called uterine milk, and the cot}^- ledons themselves have been regarded as uterine mammae. By what structures in the maternal placenta can this fluid be secreted, is a question which must now be considered. E. H. Weber pointed out* not only the formation of a chylous fluid from the capillaries of the cells (crypts), within the cotyledons of the cow and roe-deer; but that the secreting surface of the uterus was much increased through the presence of the utricular glands, which opened on the free surface of the mucous membrane between the cotyledons. The secretion of 1 The Works of Harvey, translated by Dr Willis, pp. 562, 563. * Disquisitio Anatoinica, 1667, p. 25. 3 Elementa Plujsiologice, 1766, viii. p. 245. * Hildebrandt's Anatomic, iv. 505, 1832, and Froriep's Notizen, October, 1835.