On the treatment of elephantiasis of the legs by lymphangioplasty : being a paper read in the Section of Tropical Medicine at the Annual Meeting of the British Medical Association, Liverpool, 1912 / by Frank Cole Madden, Aly Ibrahim and A.R. Ferguson.

  • Madden, Frank Cole, 1873-1929.
Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: On the treatment of elephantiasis of the legs by lymphangioplasty : being a paper read in the Section of Tropical Medicine at the Annual Meeting of the British Medical Association, Liverpool, 1912 / by Frank Cole Madden, Aly Ibrahim and A.R. Ferguson. 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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    Reprinted from the British Medical JoUr^al, November 2nd, 1912. 22 ON THE TREATME^1**»©P-EtfEPHANTIASIS OF THE LEGS BY LYMPHANGIOPLASTY. Being a Paper read in the Section of Tropical Medicine at the Annual Meeting of the British Medical Association, Liverpool, 1912 BY Frank Cole Madden, M.D.Melb., F.R.C.S.Eng., Professor of Surgery, Egyptian Government School of Medicine; Senior Surgeon, Kasr-el-Ainy Hospital, Cairo. Dr. Aly Ibrahim, Assistant Surgeon, Kasr-el-Ainy Hospital, Cairo. AND Dr. A. R. Ferguson, Professor of Pathology, Egyptian Government School of Medicine. I. Clinical Observations. Many attempts have been made of recent years to devise a satisfactory method of dealing with elephantiasis of the legs ; but, it must be admitted, the results of most of the new procedures have hitherto failed to confirm the expectations of their originators. The most hopeful and, at the same time, the most rational and practical of the proposed methods appeared to be that first advocated by Mr. W. Sampson Handley in the Lancet of January 2nd, 1909, in a paper entitled “ A Prospective Cure of Elephantiasis by the Operation of Lymphangioplasty.” Mr. Handley elaborated his thesis and described his procedure in more detail in his Hunterian Lectures on the Surgery of the Lymphatic System, re- ported in extenso in the British Medical Journal of April 9th, 1910. Enjoying rather exceptional opportunities for repeating Mr. Handley’s experiments, we wish to record our experi- ence of a short series of cases, which have yielded interest- ing but, on the whole, uniformly disappointing results. In effect, we have found that so long as the patient is kept absolutely recumbent after his operation the results are apparently most flattering ; but as soon as he begins to be up and about the swelling rapidly returns, and in a short time the leg is just as swollen as it was before the opera- tion. It does not matter how long rest is enforced, the result is the same once the action of gravity comes into play. Mr. Handley, in his summary of the results of the operation, writes: “ To my mind lymphangioplasty has [421/121