On inflammation / by G. Thin.

  • Thin, George, -1903.
Date:
[1876?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On inflammation / by G. Thin. 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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    01 <oir could he observed. His description is clear enough :—Tlie walls bounding the capillary currents become much more evident iind more strongly defined in the inflamed vessels; they appear, liowever, to consist of parallel fibrinous fibres, which gradually amalgamate with the structure of the tissue, as they recede from the current of the blood; and it is among these fibrinous-looking fibres that the lymph globules are seen to accumulate. To Addison must be assigned the merit of having first identified the colourless corpuscles lying free in the tissues with the similar corpuscles seen in the bloodvessels. The belief then prevalent amongst physiologists, that cells such as those seen by Addison are formed de novo prevented his views being accepted. In the PhilosqMccd Magazine for 1846, Dr Augustus Waller, then a young medical practitioner in Kensington, published two papers, in the first of which he showed how the tongue of the frog can be made available for the study of the tissues in the living animal; and in the second, how in the inflamed tongue the colourless blood-corpuscles can be seen to penetrate the walls of the capillaries, and, passing into the tissues, there become pus- globules. Having seciu-ed the frog's tongue over a hole cut in a slip of sheet cork, and allowed it to be exposed to the air for two or three hours, he observed that over the whole surface of the tongue there were numerous colourless corpuscles outside of the vessels, and occasionally a few scattered discs (red corpuscles). ... In some instances, the manner in which the corpuscle escaped from the interior of the tube could be distinctly followed; that part of the tube in contact with the external side of the corpuscle gradually disappeared, and at nearly the same time might be seen the formation of a distinct line of demarcation between the inner segment of the corpuscle and the fluid parts of the blood in con- tact with it. Any sliglit agitation then was capable of disengaging the corpuscle from the vessel to which it was now external, and in its place a concave depression remained which appeared sufficiently protected by some membrane as to oppose effectually the exit of the discs and the fluid parts of the blood. Strieker, in the Introduction to the StucUcn^ quotes the above passage and claims for Waller the priority of the discovery, but at the same time expresses the opinion that neither the text nor the figures in the plate which accompanied it were calculated to ' Loc. oil. I
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