Volume 1
Lectures on surgical pathology : delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons of England / by James Paget.
- James Paget
- Date:
- 1853
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Lectures on surgical pathology : delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons of England / by James Paget. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by UCL Library Services. The original may be consulted at UCL (University College London)
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![]8 out. But a far greater number of the morbid conditions of the blood consist in changes from the discovery of which the acutest chemistry seems yet far distant, and for the illustration and discussion of which we cannot adopt the facts, though we may adopt the language and the analogies, of chemistry. It is in such diseases as these that we can best discern how nice is that refinement of mutual influence, how exact and constant that adaptation, between the blood and tissues, on which health depends. I know no instance so well adapted to illustrate this as the examples of symmetrical diseases. The uniform character of such diseases is, that a certain morbid change of structure on one side of the body is repeated in the exactly corresponding part on the other side. In the lion's pelvis, for example, which is sketched in the annexed diagram from a specimen, (No. 3030,) in the College Museum, multiform as the pattern is in which the new bone, the product of some disease comparable with a human rheumatism, is deposited—a pattern more complex and irregular than the spots upon a map—there is not one spot or line on one side which is not represented, as exactly as it would be in a mirror, on the other. The likeness has more than Daguerreotype exactness, and was observable in numerous pairs of the bones similarly diseased. I need not describe many examples of such diseases. Any out-patients' room will furnish abundant instances of exact symmetry in the eruptions of eczema, lepra, and psoriasis; in the deformities of chronic rheumatism, the paralyses from lead ; in the eruptions excited by iodide of potassium or copaiba. And any large museum will con- tain examples of equal symmetry in syphilitic ulcerations of the skull ; in rheumatic and syphilitic deposits on the tibioe and other bones ; in all the effects of chronic rheu- matic arthritis, whether in the bones, the ligaments, or the](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b2128913x_0036.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
