The nature of malformations of the rectum and urogenital passages.

  • Frederic Wood Jones
Date:
1904
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The nature of malformations of the rectum and urogenital passages. 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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    Jieprinted from the British Medical Journal, December I7tk, 1WI,. THE NATURE OF THE MALFORMATIONS OF THE RECTUM AND UROGENITAL PASSAGES. By F. WOOD-JONES, M.B., B.Sc.Lond., M.R.C.S.Eng. [This paper is a brief summary of the clinical side of a paper on the Development and Musculature of the Visceral Open- ings of the Hind End, accepted by the London University for the Degree of B.Sc. by Research, October, 1903.] When the details of human embryology have merely an academic interest they are of little utility in a medical education, and serve no useful purpose in the object of all medical training—practical medicine and surgery. To be of any value at all to the medical man, embryology must help him to understand how, and why, the adult organs become developed, it must furnish him a ready explanation of the abnormalities and imperfections of development with which he meets, and it should afford some guide to him in the treatment he must undertake for their relief. Regarded in this light, much that is taught of the development of the human body must be admitted to be of little practical value in medicine. In many cases the teachings of embryology furnish no real explanation of the abnormalities that are met with clinically, and in very few do they afford any guide for the artificial repair of these abnormalities. The generally accepted view of the development of the human hind end offers no explanation of some of the abnormalities which are commonly found clinically in this situation. The growth of septa and partition walls, which is so often invoked—and often wrongly invoked—as an explanation of various abnormal conditions, is founded on a misinterpreta- tion of developmental changes, and, it would be urged, does not here occur, at any rate in the manner and to the extent that is usually described. It is therefore necessary to inquire if the present account of the development of the human hind end is a correct interpretation of the various stages that have been seen in the human embryo, if some stages have been overlooked, or some stages seen in other animals have been wrongly read into the early chapters of human development. That some stages are wrongly interpreted, and some are