On the surgery of the face / by Francis Mason.

Date:
1878
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the surgery of the face / by Francis Mason. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    at the time was less tlian an incli and a half, but at nineteen years of age it was found to have increased enormously, measuring three inches in diameter. The case showed that when a portion of the skin has been destroyed, the cicatrix appears to be persistent through life, and grows jpari passu with the rest of the body, or rather with the portion of the body over which it may be placed. The increased size of the vaccination scars observed in the adult seems to prove this. Sir James Paget puts the case well in saying that the scar of a child, when once completely formed, grows as the body does, at the same rate and according to the same general rule, so that a scar which the child might have said was as long as his own forefinger will still be as long as his forefinger when he grows to be a man. Apropos of this part of the subject, you will perhaps remember that about two years ago I showed a patient, a girl aged fifteen [photograph shown] who had a cicatrix, about an inch and a quarter in diameter, situated over the left breast, which was the result of an operation for naevus performed when she was three months old, the scar after the operation being about the size of a sixpence. As the breast developed, so the cicatrix became proportionately larger. I venture to cite this case, not as strictly relating to the part of which I am now treating, but because it illustrates in a remark- able manner the fact that cicatrices increase not
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