The bone-marrow : a cytological study forming an introduction to the normal and pathological histology of the tissue, more especially with regard to blood formation, blood destruction, etc. together with a short account of the reactions and degenerations of the tissue in disease / by W. E. Carnegie Dickson ... (With coloured plates and microscopical photographs by Richard Muir).

  • Dickson, W. E. Carnegie (William Elliot Carnegie), 1878-1954.
Date:
1908
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The bone-marrow : a cytological study forming an introduction to the normal and pathological histology of the tissue, more especially with regard to blood formation, blood destruction, etc. together with a short account of the reactions and degenerations of the tissue in disease / by W. E. Carnegie Dickson ... (With coloured plates and microscopical photographs by Richard Muir). Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

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    THE BONE-MARROW GENERAL INTRODUCTION The vital importance of the functions possessed by the bone-marrow in a state of health, and the rapidity and profound nature of its reactions and variations in disease, are as yet but too little realised in many of the departments of medical science; and in view of the important rdle which it plays in the life of the organism, the physiology and pathology of this tissue call for further research and a fuller elucidation of its structure and functions under both normal and abnormal conditions. The comparative neglect with which, in the past, the study of the marrow has been treated, is perhaps to be explained by the old and popular idea—and it is an idea which it is even yet difficult to eradicate—that the bones are fixed and permanent structures, which alter only in their size and shape with the growth of the body, and in their structure, or molecular condition, as it is usually expressed, and become more brittle as age advances. In other words, the more obvious, and certainly very important mechanical functions which the osseous system has to perform, have masked and in great part prevented due attention from being bestowed upon the other equally if not indeed more vital rdle which this tissue has to play—that of producing the great majority of the formed elements of the blood. So far from being unchanging in their structure, the bones are, with the exception only of the blood itself, perhaps the most unstable tissue in the body; and in them alterations may occur not only in the softer parts of their structure—the marrow —but may be produced with most remarkable rapidity in the hard and apparently unyielding osseous portions proper. When it is remembered that the bone-marrow is the parent tissue of the red blood corpuscles and of by far the greater proportion of the leucocyte series of formed blood elements; and when it is borne in mind with what extreme readiness these cells may undergo variations, both physiological and pathological,—as witness the vast field of knowledge being but now opened up by modern hematology,—an attempt to describe and classify the more essential of these changes in the marrow may help in the elucidation of many of the phenomena of disease which can be studied at the bedside in the living body or after death in the post-mortem room, and which constitute one of the most effective and important lines of defence which the organism has at its call in the fight against the inroads of disease. A