Ectopic pregnancy; its etiology, classification, embryology, diagnosis and treatment.

  • John Clarence Webster
Date:
1895
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Ectopic pregnancy; its etiology, classification, embryology, diagnosis and treatment. 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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    lining the lube, being flattened to various degrees, the cells in several parts appearing to be of a low cubical nature. The cilia have entirely disappeared, the cell outline is often irregu- lar, the cell substance granular and degenerating, so that the nuclei appear relatively larger than in the normal cells. In various places the cells form a mass of granular debris, the nuclei being also seen in different stages of degeneration. Thus the surface of the decidua in several parts has lost its epithelial covering. In the spaces of the spongy layer the epithelium is not so altered as on the surface of the decidua. In most of them it is more or less attached to the wall, though in many are seen several detached masses of cells in early stages of degeneration. The few spaces completely lined resemble greatly the deep ends of the glands of the mucosa in early uterine pregnancy. The explanation of the more advanced stage of degeneration in the superficial epithelium is probably connected with the formation of decidual tissue first of all in the upper layer of the decidua. It may be that the great and rapid increase of the large decidual cells interferes with the nutrition of the super- jacent epithelium, as well as causing it to be somewhat stretched and its cells partially separated, because they do not grow in correspondence with the connective tissue. Nowhere is there any appearance suggestive of the transfor- mation of the epithelial layer into the decidual cells—a change thought possible by Trommel, and recently so strongly insisted on by Dixon Jones.^ The latter author makes the remarkable statement that the e]3ithelial cells split up into cells of a mucoid type, which afterwards develop into decidual cells. I can find no corroboration of this statement. He has probably misinter- preted what are mere degenerative changes in the cells, or has 1 Am. Journ. Obst.. N.Y., 1893.