Cancer of the rectum : its pathology, diagnosis, and treatment, including a portion of the Jacksonian prize essay for 1876.

  • William Harrison Cripps
Date:
1880
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Cancer of the rectum : its pathology, diagnosis, and treatment, including a portion of the Jacksonian prize essay for 1876. 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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    wticli can be removed three, four, six, eight, ten, or twenty times without recurrence, not in the place of growth alone, but in distant organs; and I believe it is vain to attempt to explain this difference of the recurrence in dis- tant and dissimilar parts which we find in re- current tumours, or, occasionally, in the more ordinary kinds, upon any facts of difference of physical constitution. I observe it is referred to the mobility of cells, to their readiness to travel, that now and then these tumours pass from one part to the other. Now, really there are can- cers that multiply themselves in dissimilar parts whose physical condition looks as unfit for travelling as any that could be named. If I could name any kind of cancer which propa- gates itself more widely and readily than another, it would be osteoid, a mass as hard as any mass of fibrous tissue you ever found in the uterus. I know no fibrous tumour which is so hard as the fibrous mass, to say nothing of the bony structure, of an osteoid cancer, yet it pro- pagates itself speedily and everywhere. Ordi- nary scirrhous cancer of the breast is at least as hard as an ordinary fibrous tumour; but the one does what the other does not—propagate itself. The recurrent fibroid, or recurrent car-