A note on 'mulberry cells' and clusters of eosinophile spherules : probably a form of Russell's 'fuchsine bodies' in the walls of a chronic cerebral abscess and in a case of multiple myeloma / by F. Parkes Weber and R. Blendinger.

  • Frederick Parkes Weber
Date:
1906
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: A note on 'mulberry cells' and clusters of eosinophile spherules : probably a form of Russell's 'fuchsine bodies' in the walls of a chronic cerebral abscess and in a case of multiple myeloma / by F. Parkes Weber and R. Blendinger. 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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    in the cerebral cortex in the neighbourhood of the abscess. In this macro- scopic examination of the brain we had the advantage of Dr. F. E. Batten’s kind assistance. The other portions appeared not to be diseased, and this would account for the absence of localising symptoms during life. The abscess contained a thick, creamy, greenish, purulent-looking fluid, which under the microscope was found to consist of granular material and cells, the latter relatively few and in process of degeneration. The abscess wall was Arm and rather irregular, and this irregularity rather favoured the view that the disease was of syphilitic origin. It may be stated at once that sections were specially stained for tubercle bacilli with a negative result. Microscopical Examination of the Abscess Wall. Sections cut from paraffin blocks were stained in various ways. By the mode of preparation all fat was of course necessarily got rid of. The tissue was fibroid, with inflammatory cellular infiltration, merging on the outer side into normal brain tissue. Besides lymphocytes there were a good many rather large cells of an oval shape, which evidently, as the result of a degeneration process, had an extremely small nucleus and a relatively large amount of swollen-looking protoplasm, staining poorly with hsematoxylin. It is, how- ever, to a third kind of cells, representing, doubtless, a special form of degeneration, to which we particularly wish to draw attention. These cells, scattered here and there in the abscess wall, were of large size, with a single relatively small nucleus, and contained spherical globules (Plate III. Figs. 2 and 3) in their protoplasm, up to fifteen or twenty in number. The spherules attracted attention owing to their retaining the fuchsine colour in preparations which were stained with carbol-fuchsine for tubercle bacilli, but they were likewise picked out by the eosine in the ordinary hiematoxylin-eosine staining, and could be well defined by several other methods. On account of their peculiar appearance we have called the cells containing the globules “ mulberry cells.” It seems as if after a time the protoplasm becomes quite used up in the formation and growth of these globules, so that the cells come to consist of nothing but a small irregularly shaped nucleus and a mass of spherules apparently held together by a kind of cement substance or by a thin cell wall (Plate III. Fig. 3). Then, as far as we can judge, the nucleus disappears, and nothing but a cluster of spherules remains (Plate III. Fig. 1), or the cell breaks and the spherules are set free in the tissue ; but even after this their arrangement in a group or cluster, and the appearance of adherence of some of the spherules to each other, often still suggest that they have been derived from the breaking up of a single mulberry cell. In the lowest of the three clusters represented in Plate III. Fig. 1, a small body, stained deep blue, is to be noted between the spherules, and appears to be the atrophied remnant of a nucleus, as if the cluster in question had been derived from a mulberry cell similar to that represented in Fig. 3. The diameter of the spherules in the mulberry cells and clusters is mostly from one-sixth to rather more than the whole diameter of an ordinary red- blood corpuscle. That is to say, that in diameter the spherules mostly vary
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