Observations on fatty heart : comprising remarks on the morbid anatomy, symptoms and diagnosis, prognosis etiology and treatment, an essay / by Henry Kennedy.

  • Kennedy, Henry (Of Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale)
Date:
1880
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Observations on fatty heart : comprising remarks on the morbid anatomy, symptoms and diagnosis, prognosis etiology and treatment, an essay / by Henry Kennedy. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    19/188 (page 7)
    affects thenervous structures, and in direct connexion with fiitty change, which appears to me of much moment to recoo-nise—I mean Avhere effusion occurs which, in most cases, at least, is serous. This state all the experimenters on the nervous system and its functions have described, and with it the morbid anatomist is quite famihar. Rokitansky, Waller, Mitchel, and others have spoken of it as affecting the nerves when injured; Avhilst in special nerves, such as the sciatic, the same state has been found, as also in the nerves of insane persons* afSicted with general paralysis. When it affects the brain we know it as the wet braiw, and find it often joined Avith serons effusion on the surface of the organ; and so also of the spinal cord, though not so com- monly in the latter as the former. It is not, however, of the state itself I would here speak, but of its rela- tion to the fatty diathesis. I believe when this state exists or commences it is sure, sooner or later, to be attended by the effusion of serum into the nervous struc- tures of Avhich I have been speaking, and, further, that this very state plays a most important part in many of the symptoms which these cases present—in fact, that they stand to each other as cause and effect. Now this, I repeat, seems to me a most important view to take of the subject, because most writers have entirely ignored it. They all describe it, but not in the relation to which it seems to me to be entitled. But, further than Lewis states that in the paralysis of the insane the sciatic nerves were found degenerated, funiculi lessened, general diffused atrophy, sclerosis of capillaries, and general fatty degeneration.— West Ridiwj Reports. Vol. V., p. 85.