Ectopic pregnancy; its etiology, classification, embryology, diagnosis and treatment.

  • Webster, John Clarence, 1863-1950.
Date:
1895
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Ectopic pregnancy; its etiology, classification, embryology, diagnosis and treatment. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    found all stages, from the dark red or the plum coloured recent blood clot, to the old pale fibrous looking nodule of an advanced state of organisation. In some of the intermediate stages the mass may resemble hepatised lung or a piece of liver. In some cases in which the patient has reached an advanced period of pregnancy, e.(j., that described by Hart ^ in the paper to which I have referred, the placenta may have become so altered that to the naked eye scarcely a normal piece of placenta can be recognised. On examining^ the placenta recently torn up with blood extravasation by means of the microscope the following con- ditions are found:—The villi are widely separated and scattered irregularly through the blood clot, many of them having been torn from both foetal and maternal attachments. In some parts masses of them are heaped together either against the maternal wall, against the chorionic layer near the foetal surface of the placenta, or in the blood clot. The blood may be seen commencing to organise, fine filaments of fibrin running throughout it, and a large number of leucocytes being often seen in various places. When the old nodules are studied the mass is found to consist of dense fibrin, often canalised and in places very tough and fibrous. The villi lying scattered about in this present various appearances; they possess very little covering epithelium, or, in most cases, have lost it altogether; they have become very fibrous, their vessels ha\'ing completely closed, and being indicated only by lines of blood pigment. Others show a sort of hyaline degeneration. Throughout the fibrin masses hc^matoidin crystals are scattered in small or large groups. In different 1 Op. cit., p. 170. - Sec my '• Tubo-Peritoneal Ectopic Gestation, p. 33.