On improvements recently made in the treatment of stricture of the urethra : being a supplement to A treatise on stricture and stone / by James Arnott.

  • Arnott, James Moncrieff, 1794-1885.
Date:
1856
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On improvements recently made in the treatment of stricture of the urethra : being a supplement to A treatise on stricture and stone / by James Arnott. 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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    in cases resisting the common method of dilatation, inasmuch as the dangers of long continued stricture are thus averted, these cases would be greatly reduced in number if, instead of bougies and catheters, the perfect mode of dilatation by fluid pressure, now for the first time fully described, were substituted. To the observations on stricture, it was my intention to add an enlarged transcript of a paper on Stone in the Bladder, which appeared in the ‘ Lancet’ of the 3rd of November last, but I find that the supplement would have been thus incon- veniently enlarged into a volume. Lithotrity, though an improvement as respects certain cases of this disease, has not answered the expectations once formed of it. In an essay on the removal of stone without cutting, which I published soon after the Treatise on Stricture just referred to, breaking the stone was proposed only as an auxiliary to slow and painless dilatation of the passage or outlet, when this was insufficient ; and M. Civiale erred in converting it into the chief expedient. It is, in consequence, still the lamentable fact, that of every four operations on adults now performed for stone, one, at an average, proves fatal. I am persuaded that opening the way for a stone (or for its fragments, when large) by an instrument constructed on the same principle of fluid pressure that has been so long successfully applied to stricture, and already to several cases of stone, would, were it generally practised, very much reduce this rate of mortality. The methods of removing stone by dilatation and lithotrity are generally regarded as very different operations, chiefly because their names are different. From what has been stated above, it is evident that the first of these operations might have been justly called dilatation with lithotrity, and as the second is rarely unaccompanied with dilatation, the