The vermiform appendix and its diseases / by Howard A. Kelly ... and E. Hurdon ... With 399 original illustrations, some in colors, and 3 lithographic plates.

  • Howard Atwood Kelly
Date:
[1905], [©1905]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The vermiform appendix and its diseases / by Howard A. Kelly ... and E. Hurdon ... With 399 original illustrations, some in colors, and 3 lithographic plates. 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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    pouce'] in length, was wider than in its natural state. The fact appeared to me so extraordinary that I wished to ascertain what the organ could contain; I touched it, and I felt a foreign bod}', as hard as if it were petrified When the cecum was reached, we found it filled with whole cherries. I say cherries, and not nuts, although their color was a dark brown. After having evacuated some fecal matter, we drew forth the hard body which I had felt through the coats of the intestine. It was the size of a large orange, and it resembled a compact potato, that is to say, one of those which are much less elongated than they are in general; its weight was four ounces, its consistency that of fine, well-worked butter, its color internally nearly that of an ordinary sponge; it seemed to be about as compact as touchwood. The writer makes no comment on the appearances he describes, and apparently he formed no opinion in regard to them. The case stands on record simply as the first account in the literature of fecal concretions in the vermiform appendix. In 1790 the Encyclopedie nieihodique was issued, the second volume of which contains an article on ''Tumors and Tubercles,'' where an incidental allusion occurs to the condition of the appendix in a case of death resulting from disease of the lungs. In the appendix of the cecum there was a brittle stone, the size of a small nut, which when dried was inflammable; in the centre of the layers of which the little stone was composed there was a hair.It is also re- marked that the jejunum and a portion of the ileum were inflamed and blackened in certain places. In this instance not only is the presence of a foreign body noted, but the fact that a hair formed its nucleus. Jadei.ot's, the next case on record, the first in the nineteenth century, was published in the year 1808. I abstract from the BibUotheqiie medicale for 1814 a short account: A boy of thirteen died, two days after his entrance into the Hdpital des Enfants, of an ad^^namic fever; at the autopsy a great number of lumbricoid worms were found in various parts of the intestines, including four in the vermiform appendix. Up to this date, 1808, the history of the vermiform appendix, which con- sisted of the four cases already cited, distributed over a half century, belongs exclusively to France. In the year 1812 a case was reported in England by a London physician, Parkinson. The patient, a boy of five, died after two days' illness charac- terized by vomiting, great prostration of strength, and barely percept- ible pulse. The abdomen was distended and painful on pressure. The autopsy showed a general peritonitis with recent adhesions. All the viscera were healthy except the appendix, which was perforated by an ulcer the size of a crow-quill, through which its contents had escaped into the peritoneal cavity and con- tained a piece of hardened feces. Our author presents this case in the purely objective manner characteristic of these early reports, but it is plain that he recognized the perforation in the a p p e n fl i x as the