Researches on phthisis: anatomical, pathological and therapeutical / by P. C. A. Louis.
- Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis
- Date:
- 1844
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Researches on phthisis: anatomical, pathological and therapeutical / by P. C. A. Louis. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.
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![circumstances under winch the transformation in question is effected. The first point to be remarked is, that fatty transformation of the liver is almost exclusively observed in persons affected with phthisis; so that it may, to a certain extent, be considered a dependence upon that disease. Among two hundred and thirty individuals destroyed by acute or chronic diseases, other than phthisis, and in about equal numbers, nine examples of fatty hver were only to be found; and of these nine persons, seven had a certain number of tubercles in the lungs. Adding these nine to the forty others, we have forty-nine cases of fatty liver, the only ones I have collected in the space of three [?] years, and of these forty-seven occurred in phthisical subjects. Assuredly there are few phenomena, among those universally admitted to be reciprocally dependent, to the connexion of which facts bear more unanimous testimony. Sex, again, is one of the conditions influencing fatty trans- formation of the liver. Of the forty-nine cases referred to, ten only were supplied by males; so that the proportion of fatty hvers in men and women was very closely as 1 : 4. It is true that phthisis itself was a little more frequent among the latter than the former, in the proportion of 66 : 57; but this difference is not sufficiently great to alter the proportion men- tioned very materially, and my statement remains correct. Strength or weakness of constitution had no influence on the morbid state under consideration; and the same is true of age. Of the forty phthisical subjects referred to eighteen were aged from twenty to thirty; thirteen, from thirty to forty; five, from forty to fifty; three, from fifty to sixty; and one, from sixty to seventy;—a proportion very much the same as that of phthisis itself, at the different periods of life. Nor do I reckon among the causes favouring the development of a fatty state of the liver, diseases of the duodenum ; for these diseases were rare, and quite as much so in subjects whose livers had undergone the change in question, as in those in whom it was perfectly healthy. Fatty transformation of the liver may be very rapidly accom- plished : I have observed it in cases of phthisis, which had gone through all their stages in fifty days. (Case xli.) The rapidity of progress of the tuberculous affection did not even](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21513235_0139.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
