The Microscope Volume 11

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1891 Excerpt: ...or leucocytes, must fall to the ground. All the German and American pathologists, who have accepted Cohnheim's teachings as the standard ones in the doctrine of inflammation, will of course ignore the novel views which completely upset a theory that held sway for nearly twenty-five years. Even their explanation of the silver images in inflamed cornese, that the isolated leucocytes adapt themselves by an intervening brown line of cement-substance, is proved to be erroneous. J. H. Mennen has shown that these brown lines are dotted, interrupted, owing to the presence of delicate intercommunications between the inflammatory corpuscles. This means that the inflamed cornea, although largely made up of indifferent or medullary corpuscles, remains a tissue nevertheless, and is able to re-enter its normal condition or become transformed into cicatricial tissue. It is only after the breaking of the interconnecting threads that the inflammatory corpuscles become isolated and now represent pus corpuscles. An abscess in the centre of the cornea is, therefore, the result of a disintegration of the tissue, and not an accumulation of leucocytes. Novel doctrines, deserving a rather acute power of observation will find approval in a slow way. It is, however, gratifying to learn that in the United States the new views, which are not the worse for having been dubbed "bioplasou theory " by my late friend Louis Elsberg, gain ground from year to year. Charles F. Cox, in an excellent presidential address, delivered before the New York Microscopical Society, January 3, 1890, expresses this progress in the following words: "I can well remember, as perhaps you also can, the disgusted incredulity with which this new doctrine was received,--an incredulity in which, I con...