The nature and affinities of tubercle.

  • Southey, Reginald.
Date:
1867
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The nature and affinities of tubercle. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    adventitious lump, has in the last hundred years obtained in modern European languages a signifi- cance so serious and important, that I have deemed it worth our while to refer to its earliest application in a medical sense, to learn, if I could, whether it had suffered from over or mis-use, whether the original little apple idea had been frittered away, or whether, rolling over the lips of so many generations of men, the term might not, like the snowball from the mountain peak, have acquired an expansion and vis eundo and vice by ill omen, which justified us in get- ting out of its way: but when 1 find Herr Virchow in his Cellular Pathology (p. 477) likening large conglomerate Tubercles to a Borsdorf apple, I receive the old analogy back again with a hearty welcome, perceiving that there must exist a simi- litude real and useful for purposes of illustration, and descriptively accurate enough to justify our adhe- rence to a time-honoured Avord. Now, the subject which I propose should occupy us in to-day's lecture is the real nature of Tubercle; but before we can discuss this we must agree to under- stand one and the same thing under this name. It is always interpreted, as Dr. Aitkens says, to refer to adventitious masses. The characters of these masses are, however, any thing but fixed: thus we have Tubercula Syphilitica, Mucous Tubercles, Tuber- cula Scrofulosa, and Tubercula Carcinomatosa, when the word simply implies an exuberant nodular growth; and again we find Tubercle bestowed as a