Notes on pathology : a handbook for the post-mortem room / by R.E. Carrington ; edited, revised and amplified by H. Evelyn Crook and Guy Mackeson.

Date:
1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Notes on pathology : a handbook for the post-mortem room / by R.E. Carrington ; edited, revised and amplified by H. Evelyn Crook and Guy Mackeson. 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.

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    7. Diabetes.—No doubt ordinary tubercular phthisis may occur in diabetes, as in any other disease. But it is rare to meet with anything Hke tubercle in this disease. In a series of cases tabulated by Dr. Fagge, seventeen out of forty cases of diabetes died of phthisis. In twelve out of the seventeen no tubercle was found in the body. The probability is that the so-called diabetic phthisis is pneumonic and non-tubercular in most cases. The disease is characterised by rounded patches at the apex or base of the lung (very frequently the latter), which are the size of a hazel nut or larger, and in which a cavity rapidly forms containing a central slough. In other words, the disease resembles the boils and carbuncles common in diabetes. Dr. Good- hart's name of necrotic pneumonia is probably more applicable than phthisis. Still, however, it must be remembered that true tubercular phthisis and tuber- cular deposit in the intestines and elsewhere may be met with in diabetes. [Dr. Purdy in his monograph on diabetes states that in his experience tubercular phthisis attacks the majority of patients in whom diabetes has existed beyond two or three years.—Eds.] Prognosis of Tubercle. There is not the slightest doubt that tubercle some- times undergoes cure. Scars and caseous nodules, sur- rounded by fibrous tissue and calcareous nodules, are constantly being met with at the apices of the lungs in patients who have died from other diseases, these nodules being the result of ancient tubercle. Bristowe believes that even small miliary tuberculosis undergoes retrogression. He describes the lung in such cases as seamed throughout with minute stellate cica-
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