The Quarterly Journal of Foreign Medicine and Surgery and of the Sciences Connected with Them (Volume 2 )

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1820. Excerpt: ... alludes. We have sometimes witnessed, within the cavities, others which appear to bear a strict resemblance to those mentioned as occurring on the surface of the heart. Not successive layers of dead fibrin, but a living coating over a greater or lessextent of the cavity, inseparably connected with its living membrane. They were probably the result of inflammation. We here introduce a cause of disease, so far as we know, hitherto unobserved, but, if correct, truly interesting. It is connected in the Memoirs before us, with the steatomatous affection of the organ under consideration. Vesaliushad a patient who had long been troubled with symptoms of diseased heart. On dissection, he found fleshy excresences in the ventricles. Our author remarks, that he has frequently seen remarkable instances of this sort. They resemble the excresences that are familiarly known to invade the internal surface of the uterus, bladder, lining membrane of the bronchiae and alimentary canal. The author shewed, in a paper which was inserted in the Transactions of the Institute for 1808, that these were sometimes detached from their connections in the latter instances specified, and thrown loose into the cavity or passage in which they had germinated. He thinks it probable the same process sometimes takes place in the heart, and thus produces the most fatal accidents. He furnishes-us with no case in which death thus occurred. M. Riolan-, however, is persuaded of the-reality of this cause of disease and death. Having pointed out the probability of the occurrence, much observation is necessary, and we hope will not be spared in bringing the question to a satisfactory termination. The fourth cause mentioned is whatwe have called a varicose state of the coronary vessels. It involves t...