Cancer and its complications / by Charles Egerton Jennings.

  • Jennings, Charles Egerton
Date:
1893
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Cancer and its complications / by Charles Egerton Jennings. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    The growth consists chiefly of fibrous tissue, enclosing clumps of cells within alveoli; and derives its name from the toughness and quantity of its fibrous element. The cells are large in size, with large nuclei, and are polymor- phous from mutual pressure. Scirrhus is first circum- scribed, but soon commences to spread from the periphery, infiltrating the adjacent tissues and puckering the region in which it grows, the infiltrated parts contracting. Dimpling of the skin (in the case of the tumour subjacent to it) therefore appears ; and the tumour becomes adherent to the skin as well as to the parts beneath it. The contraction of the scirrhus gives rise to pain from implication of the nerves involved in it; the pain is described as of a stabbing, paroxysmal, and lancinating character; the other pressure-symptoms will vary with the site of the growth. After the skin has become involved, it generally presents a dusky colour, and some- times there is desquamation. Distinct cancerous nodules may appear in the skin ; should this structure become hard and brawny, the term cancer en cuirasse is applied to it. Ulceration may follow, and the ulcer presents these characters : it is of irregular outline and generally solitary ; its edges are dusky, hard, usually everted and nodular ; its surface is irregularly excavated ; its discharge is fcetid, semi-purulent, haemorrhagic or sanious ; and, according to Gross, the carcinomatous fungus haematodes of the older writers is apocryphal. Scirrhus grows chiefly in the direction of its best blood-supply, and increases in size by continuity. It disseminates by the lymphatic system, the glands on the proximal side of the tumour, which lie nearest to the growth, becoming first involved ; and the lymphatic vessels which unite the tumour with the glands are indurated, and sometimes stand out like cords. The implication of the glands may be of a scirrhous or medul- lary character ; if a cluster of glands be affected they become fused together, the new growth running a similar course to the primary lesion. The cancerous cachexia is commonly said to become
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