The diagnosis of surgical cancer / by John Zacharias Laurence.

  • John Zachariah Laurence
Date:
1858
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The diagnosis of surgical cancer / by John Zacharias Laurence. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    constituents and of the forms of these latter, inter se* The FIBRO-PLASTIC CELL is characterised by its ex- tremely elongated slender form and a well-defined ellipsoidal nucleolated nucleus; this may occupy the middle or the end of the cell, has generally a yellowish tint, and often bulges out the cell wall where it is situate; it, as indeed the whole cell, is transparent, with little or no appearance of granulation; the nucleo- lus (or there may be more than one) is small and punc- tiform. PI. I., figs 6 and 7, exhibit these characters in their typical condition. It is not uncommon, however, to find all degrees of elongation between these filamentous cells and per- fectly spheroidal ones in one and the same specimeuj shewing clearly that the two are but extreme cases of one and the same organic element. Such a series of transitional forms may be seen in PI. I., fig. 8. * The cell, the characters of which we have just been describing cancer-cell, has been designated by M. Leopold Oilier ( Eecherches Anatomo-pathologiques sur la Structure intime des Tumours Cancereuses, par Leopold Oilier. Montpellier, 1856,) as the macrocyte (from fxaKpSs, great and kvtos, cavity); by M. Robin as the thnetollast (from dvi]T6s mortal and fiXaarSs, germ). Thnetoblast is as ob- jectionable as cancer-cell, both implying that the malignancy of a tumor and the presence of this peculiar form of cell in the tumor are necessarily concomitants —an impHcation which research has proved to be false. Willing as we are to con- cede to M. Oilier the merit of having proposed the word macrocyte—which, im- plying nothing further than a peculiar Jbrm of cell, without reference to any clinical import this may possess—is free from the objections that attach themselves to the word cancer-cell and thnetoblast, we nevertheless consider that, till our knowledge of the relations between the anatomical and the cUnical characters of morbid growths rests on a more secure basis, than it does at present, any inno- vation in the nomenclature of the subject is more likely to create confusion, than to be productive of any really useful result. We shall therefore in the following pages still retain the term cancer-cell, understanding by it an anatomical element independent of any clinical relations.