Descriptive catalogue of the pathological specimens contained in the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of England.

  • James Paget
Date:
1883
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Descriptive catalogue of the pathological specimens contained in the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by UCL Library Services. The original may be consulted at UCL (University College London)

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    On opening the left auricle, I found it stronger than usual, and a good deal of coagulated blood in it, not of the buff-colour, nor of that strength. The left ventricle towards the apex had a great many of the fasciculi become hard, callous, and white ; while the other parts were of their Statural consistence and colour. At those white parts were entangled a great many pieces of coagulated blood, one of which was as large as a walnut. This whiteness is common to all muscles that have lost their action, let the cause be what it wiU ; and this may be the case m other parts of the body, viz., the kidney. Those coagula were very different from those formed after death : the first had all the appearance of recent coagidated blood, after it has been taken from the body ; this had all the appearance that blood has in an aneurism, for it is irre- gular, and the colour is not higher on one side more than on the other, and is generally redder than the other polypus, which red- ness is of a darkish brown. Now, as we see a great difference between these two polypi, one, we are certain, arises from want of action, and is like all other that are formed gradually, and from the want of action; while the other is like the settling of common blood after death ; in every respect, is much more in quantity than we can expect, and takes on the forms of parts, as all blood quite at rest would. From these circumstances, I should think one was formed before death, the other after, or, at soonest, at the time of death; and as we see that blood, being left to rest, and only allowed to cool gradually, takes on more and more of the buff colour and con- sistence in proportion to these two circumstances; and this must be the case with the blood in a dead person : but why the blood should take on this appearance in the right ventricle more than the left, I do not pretend to say.—Hunterian Manuscript ; Ac- count of the Dissections of Morbid Bodies, p. 33. I opened a man at St. George's Hospital, He was supposed to be consumptive, but was a little dropsical. His lungs were more solid than what is usual for that viscus in a sound state, but no partial disease nor hardness, nor adhesions of any consequence. There was a good deal of liquor pericardii mixed with coagulable lymph. His heart was very large and white in its coats, some- what like the flesh of veal. In the apex of the left ventricle there was a substance about the bigness of a pigeon's egg, but more flat. Its detached surface was smooth, but a little uneven, like the ex- ternal surface of the brain, was of a whitish cast, streaked with brown or red, and pulpy to the feel. When cut into, it i^roved to be softer in its middle than exterjial surface, so that the external surface had formed a kind of coat. Its substance seemed to be half dissolved into a whitish brown fluid, of the consistence of cream. Cutting this was something like cutting into the udder of a cow that was giving milk, [in which] the milk is seen mixed a little with blood on the cut surface. I found that this substance was entirely separable from the substance of the heart, and only connected to it by being entangled in the fasciculi of that part. The parts of it that passed in between the fasciculi were firmer