A case of spondylitis deformans / by W. Allen Sturge.

  • Sturge, William Allen, 1850-1919.
Date:
[1879]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A case of spondylitis deformans / by W. Allen Sturge. 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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    rheumatoid atfections of other joints ; hut quite as frequently it is for a long time confined to the spinal column, or to the spine and the costo-sternal articulation. Leyden, in his ‘ Clinical Treatise on Diseases of the Spinal Cord,’ says that the disease is usually one of later, middle, or advanced life, and that it has no connection with gout, syphilis, scrofula, or tubercle. Todd, however, met with a case in a man 25 years old; and he describes also the case of a young girl with chronic rheumatism of all her joints, in whom anchylosis of the whole of the spinal column had taken place. Eulenberg also met with an example of typical spondylitis deformans in a child of 12 years only. The bony outgrowths of the vertebrse may encroach upon the spinal canal; but no case is on record in which paralysis has been traced to this cause. Yirchow, however, describes in a paper in his ‘ Archive ’ how, in a holiday tour, he came across some bones in the cliarnel-house of an old monastery which could not have been less than from three to four hundred years old, and which displayed the characteristic change of rheumatoid arthritis. Amongst others, the vertebrae were much impli- cated by the disease, certain vertebrae were anchylosed, and the spinal canal in some of them was reduced to such narrow dimensions by the invasion of bony outgrowths that it could not admit the little finger. Virchow states it as his opinion that in this case paralysis must have been infallibly produced by the pressure on the cord, resulting from this invasion of the canal. A case apparently very similar to that which forms the subject of this communication was described by Dr. Hilton Eagge in the ‘Pathological Transactions’ for 1877. The patient was a man 34 years of age, in whom the arches and spinous processes of the vertebrae were firmly united by bone, the ribs being also firmly anchylosed to the vertebrae both by the head and by the tubercles. In addition to the spinal condition, there was in this case anchylosis of the right hip joint. The patient died of pulmonary disease. Spotli.uroode ib Co., PrinU rs, N'tW-strect Square, London.