A treatise on cancer of the breast and of the mammary region / by A. Velpeau ; tr. from the French by W. Marsden.

  • Alfred-Armand-Louis-Marie Velpeau
Date:
1856
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A treatise on cancer of the breast and of the mammary region / by A. Velpeau ; tr. from the French by W. Marsden. 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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    fungous, musliroom-like excrescences, wliich tend to soften more and more, which easily fall into putrelage, or form soft balls or clews ; whilst the ulcerated adenoid remains hard, elastic, bleeds little, does not tend to be destroyed, to be detached, and maintains a greyish tint, even whilst becoming fungous. Thus, at no period of their evolution can the encepha- loid cancer and the adenoid tumour be confounded with each other by a skilful practitioner. If A. Berard* had attended to the preceding remarks, he would not have taken for a mammary hypertrophy the enormous ence- phaloid cancer which he removed, at Versailles, from a lady of twenty-five years of age ; nor would he have maintained later,f that the fibrous or chronic mammary tumours cannot be distinguished from cancer. All forms of scirrhus are equally susceptible of being distinguished from the adenoid tumour; and first the scirrhus, still more than the encephaloid, is always con- founded with the tissues or constituent parts of the affected organ. Never has any one seen a true scirrhus roll, slide between the organic lam elite which surround or approach it; bj^ examining it, it is shown that it forms a portion of the diseased organ, of which it is only a harder part, more developed, more altered; proceeding from the point of departure, the scirrhus maintains this character : as it enlarges, it seems to involve the tissues, and to appropriate the organs themselves; whilst the adenoid only spreads them out, extends, separates them, in order to create a dwelHng-place, to obtain room for itself like a foreign body. The independence, the mobility, the absence of con- tinuity of the adenoid tumour with the surrounding- tissues, form a diagnostic sign so important, that, alone, it is often sufficient to distinguish it from every other tumour of the breast, and may almost be considered as pathognomonic. The chondroid tumours, the colloid can- * These de Concours, 1842, p. ]32. t Bulletin de VAcademie, t. ix. p. 449.