A study of the arteries and veins in Bright's disease / by Arthur V. Meigs.

  • Meigs, Arthur Vincent, 1850-1912.
Date:
1888
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A study of the arteries and veins in Bright's disease / by Arthur V. Meigs. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    »5 camphor in mounting produced the apj)earances described. In the spinal cord 1 have found arteries with walls that looked entirely structureless except for a few nuclei lying at the edge of the lumen of the vessel, and an.swcred exactly to the apjiearances described and figured by Gull and Sutton (“ Ixjndon Path. Soc. Trans.,” h(. cit.). It might be well to mention here, as a matter of interest, though I have no explanation to offer, and do not know if it had any bearing upon the condition, that in this same ca-se, which was one of marked Bright’s disease, the olivary body, and nucleus dentatus within it ujwn the right side, was much larger than the left, though no morbid condition of the tissue itself could be discovered upon either side. In two cases in which 1 made extensive microscopic ex- amination of the tissues, and they are the two from which the vessels represented in the plates were taken, I found morbid changes in the veins as well as the arteries. Atheroma of veins so extensive as that of the femoral, which is shown in Figs. 7 and 8, is not usually descrilxxl as l)eing common, though the ot:casional occurrence of the disease in veins is siiffidently well known. .After the section from which the picture is made was prejiared, it was found impossible to determine with certainly, from the ruicrc)Sco])ic ap{)earances alone, that the larger vessel of the two was really a vein, so great is the thickening of the intiraa and fibrous coats, and it was only by a careful examination of the jucce of tissue from which the section was cut, and the discovery of a well-marked valve in the vein, that an al>solute conclusion was reached, 'lire two vessels, which were removed from the upper part of the thigh together, were found to be rigid, like bony tubes, and it was only after decalcification that sections of them could be cuL The process of disease in this vein ap}>ears to have been exactly the same as takes place in arteries, some thickening of all the coats, perhaps, for when con- sidering the state of the muscular layer it must be re- meml)cred how thin it is in a natural condition in veins, and of the intiina in particular. It is a noticeable fact