A practical treatise on venereal diseases, or, Critical and experimental researches on inoculation : applied to the study of these affections : with a therapeutical summary and special formulary / by Ph. Ricord ; translated from the French by Henry Pilkington Drummond.

  • Ricord, Ph., 1800-1889. Traité pratique des maladies vénériennes. English
Date:
1843
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A practical treatise on venereal diseases, or, Critical and experimental researches on inoculation : applied to the study of these affections : with a therapeutical summary and special formulary / by Ph. Ricord ; translated from the French by Henry Pilkington Drummond. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    one ganglion presents all the characters of a virulent bubo, whilst the neighboring ganglions, in which the inflammation may come to sup- puration, as well as in the surrounding cellular tissue, only present a simple and non-virulent character. 1 was some time in recognizing these conditions, and in explaining to myself why all buboes did not inoculate, as asserted by those who have repeated my experiments, without being well acquainted with them; and how it happened that a bubo, whose pus did not inoculate one day, often did the next; or that in a bubo with separate centres, and which might be called multilocular, one of these centres furnished an inoculable pus, and the others not. I then began to make my experiments more precise, and I first in- oculated all the buboes at the moment of opening them, with the first pus which escaped, and the result was negative, which explained to me the assertion of M. Cullerier, who had perhaps only made his ex- periments under these circumstances, or in cases of simple buboes. I then took pus from these same buboes, two, three, four, five days and more, after the opening, and then it gave, in many instances, posi- tive results, and in others, inoculation continued to produce nothing. In the first case, the centre, (foyer,) as well as the edges of the open- ing, soon assumed the character of chancre, whilst in the second, the abscesses followed the march of simple phlegmonous or lymphatic ab- scesses, progressing towards healing. However, there remained an important question for me to decide, viz., whether in the cases where the pus of the bubo did not inocu- late at the moment of being opened, it would acquire its inoculating quality by contact with the air, or by becoming subsequently mixed with the pus of a pre-existing chancre, or in any other manner. The solution still appeared very difficult, when a patient presented himself to my notice, with a bubo consequent on a chancre, and a copious sup- puration. I opened the abscess; but after having evacuated the pus of the cellular tissue, I found, in the midst of the centre, a very large lymphatic ganglion, with evident fluctuation in its centre. I opened it, and made with the pus it contained an inoculation, and a similar one with pus taken from the surrounding parts, viz. the cellular tissue; and, whilst the pus taken from the ganglion produced the characteris- tic pustule, that from the cellular tissue remained inert. I was then convinced that the difference did not depend upon chance, or things which only occurred after the opening of the buboes, but upon the pus not having been sought where it was situated. After this observation, I made a series of experiments, which left no furiher doubt as to the results of inoculation. of buboes into superficial and profound, is correct; but if only those he considered sy- philitic buboes, which are the result of the direct absorption of pus, there only exist su- perficial]buboes, and the opinion of my colleague and friend, M. Philippe Boyer, is cor- rect. (De la syphilis. Paris, 1836.) As in the study and treatment of buboes, there are other things to be attended to beside the syphilitic virus, this distinction of profound and superficial buboes, upon which M. Desruelles particularly insists, ought to be adher- ed to and studied with care.
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