Three cases of tumour arising from skin-glands in the dog : showing the connection between disorder of the glandular structure and function and cancerous invasion of the connective tissue / by Charles Creighton.

  • Creighton, Charles, 1847-1927.
Date:
1882
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Three cases of tumour arising from skin-glands in the dog : showing the connection between disorder of the glandular structure and function and cancerous invasion of the connective tissue / by Charles Creighton. 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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    TUMOURS ARISING FROM taken from one side of a tubule, which shows in the other parts of its circuit the same condition that is drawn in fig. G, viz. an accumulation of large spherical and other cells, both in the deeper layers of the epithelium lining the tubule and also in the spaces of the connective tissue nearest to the basement membrane. That part of the circuit of the tubule drawn in fig. 7 appears to me to exemplify, when compared with fig. 6, the step or the leap from a process of merely functional disturbance to a cancerous process. The connective tissue on the other side of the basement membrane is not occupied by cast- off cellular products of the secreting structure, but by a row of its own cells which have emerged from their hidden and quiescent state, have become plump and granular, and have to some extent assumed the cubical form and the regular order of epithelial cells. These characters are to be seen in the uniform row of cells next to, or perhaps within, the basement membrane, and the deeper rows of the connective tissue are following in the same direction. That abnormal formation of epithelium from the underlying connective tissue advances around the crypt or tubule in ever widening circles until the whole stroma or supporting tissue of the gland is incor- porated, as it were, into the glandular structure. The cancerous infection in tumour No. 3 is for the most part the same in plan as I have described and figured, in a former paper, for a case of scirrhus of the breast; and the language which I have applied to the latter is literally applicable to the present case : “ Under ordinary circum- stances the row of epithelial cells on the wall of the acinus would be separated from the subjacent tissue by a more or less obvious basement membrane; whether an actual and substantial basement membrane be present or not, nothing can be clearer than the total separation of the epithelium from the tissue next to it. But here the line of demarcation of epithelium from connective tissue is broken through. . . The breaking down of the wall of partition between epithelial and sub-epithelial tissues,