Dr. Ian Carr

Professor Emeritus, Faculty of Medicine, University of Manitoba

This presentation is intended to illustrate to medical students the history of our knowledge of disease processes by describing the evolution of our knowledge of the lesion, the local tissue change which accounts for change in bodily function, locally or systemically. This functional change may be accompanied by disease, the patient's awareness of disturbance from the normal. The history of the investigation of disease is a history of attempts to find out where the abnormality is, and to classify it, first in words, then in words and pictures of grossly abnormal organs, more recently by microscopic, and biochemical investigation.

Early writings, statues and votive offerings show that the idea of local tissue change came very early. An ancient Mesopotamian sculpture, dated about 3000 BC depicts a lion with an arrow in the spine, and evident paraplegia. Carcinoma and "schirrhus" were described in the Hippocratic writings. Celsus described several pathologic changes, for instance enlargement of the spleen. Galen described tumores praeter naturam and there were repeated analogies between a neoplasm and a crab.

After the Dark Ages, isolated autopsies occurred as early as 1302, for forensic purposes. There was however considerable reluctance to dissect the human body, for religious reasons. This reluctance was set aside by the famous decision of the Faculty of Theology at the University of Salamanca in 1556:

Thereafter, more and more often, autopsies were carried out by physicians to find out why their patients had died, or when people died in suspicious circumstances.

Antonio Benivieni, a Florentine, practised medicine in his native city for over thirty years, and kept methodical records, including brief accounts of a score of autopsies, for instance on a case of carcinoma of the stomach. His records were edited after his death, and published as De Abditis...Morborum..Causis. The autopsy accounts are brief, but the book is clearly the forerunner of the great pathology texts.

Such investigations were interdependent with the revitalization of the study of human anatomy, carried out by dissection of the normal human body , as part of medical education. This revitalization is epitomized by the De Humani Corporis Fabrica, (1543) of Andreas Vesalius, Professor of Anatomy and Surgery at Padua.

Giovanni Batista Morgagni was born at Forli in Italy, and trained in medicine at the University of Bologna. He became Professor of Practical Medicine at Padua in 1711, and later Professor of Anatomy. His professional life was spent on the practice of medicine, and the study of normal and pathologic anatomy by the post mortem dissection of patients whose disease he had often followed in life. His great book was published when he was 79 years of age.

De Sedibus Causis Morborum, Venetia, 1761

Morgagni described lesions and related them to the course of the disease.

Matthew Baillie was a nephew of the Hunter brothers, and was trained in medicine in the University of Glasgow. He taught anatomy with William Hunter from whom he inherited the use of his museum, and the ownership of the Anatomy School on Great Windmill St., London. His book The Morbid Anatomy of some of the most Important Parts of the Human Body was first published in 1793, went into ten English editions, and was widely translated. The illustrations,m The Series of Engravings, were published separately, from 1799-1803.

A new edition of these has recently been produced by Professor Harold Attwood of the University of Melbourne, from a copy rescued in 1953, from the flooded basement of the old medical library.

Baillie was physician to St. George's Hospital, London, and spent the latter part of his life in a lucrative clinical practice in London, and as physician to George III.

Baillie published clear illustrations of lesions as seen in the autopsy room.

John Hunter was born at Long Calderwood, Lanarkshire, Scotland, the youngest of ten children, when his father was seventy years old. His formal education was scant, but after service in the army, he became a well known teacher of Anatomy in London. His collection of specimens was the basis of two famous museums. He was surgeon to St. George's Hospital and a Fellow of the Royal Society. His army service led to an interest in gun shot wounds, and inflammation, and in the long run to his famous work, A Treatise on Blood, Inflammation and Gunshot Wounds, published a year after his death. This text contains his classic observations on inflammation. While these observations were not individually new, he emphasized the principles that inflammation was a general phenomenon, with stages, which might resolve, or progress and suppurate. He stated clearly that "the extravasated fluid in inflammatory oedema was water, and that there were constitutional effects," although he believed that "fever was often the cause of local inflammation."

His picture of the early vascular changes was clear:

Hunter described the lesion of inflammation in several phases and variants.

Francis Xavier Bichat, the son of a physician, was born at Thiorette in the French Jura, and studied at Montpellier, Lyons and Paris, where he later taught, and was physician to the Hotel Dieu. He conceived the idea of the "tissues" of the body, existing in various organs and susceptible to disease in various ways.

He noted that such "membranes" as the urethral epithelium could show reactive changes: "This epidermis like that of the skin is subject to become callous by pressure" (A Treatise on the membranes in general, and on the different membranes in particular, translated by John G. Coffin, Boston, 1813).

Bichat analyzed the organs of the body into tissues, and suggested that these tissues were the basis of lesions.

Astley Paston Cooper was born near Norwich, and trained in medicine at Edinburgh. He was on the staff of both St. Thomas' and Guy's Hospital, and was a diligent, successful surgeon, popular as a teacher--despite the fact that his marriage to an heiress had rendered him financially independent. In llustrations of Diseases of the Breast, Part 1 (London, 1829), Cooper described inflammatory and innocent tumours of the breast, and gives one of the earliest descriptions of hyperplastic cystic disease of the breast (fibroadenosis).

Cooper illustrated surgically removed lesions, and pointed out the difference between benign and malignant lesions of the breast.

Carl Rokitansky was born at Koniggratz, and studied medicine in Prague and Vienna. He spent his life as pathologist to the Allgemeines Krankenhaus in Vienna. Rokitansky was a great descriptive pathologist; his pathology was gross pathology as seen with the naked eye. He gave early detailed descriptions of arterial disease, congenital cardiac lesions, and massive hepatic necrosis. His autopsy technique was widely followed, and he is alleged to have performed 30,000 autopsies.

Despite his anatomical bias, Rokitansky had a curious fondness for humoral ideas: "Humoral pathology is simply a requirement of common practical sense."

His ideas on aetiology sometimes read strangely to the modern ear: "The crasis which gives rise to the production of cancer consists mainly in a preponderance of albumin."

His Manual of Pathological Anatomy (three volumes) was published in Vienna 1842-1846.

Rokitansky systematized the description of gross lesions.

Rudolf Virchow born in Pomerania, and educated at the University of Berlin, was Professor of Pathology at Wurzburg and then Berlin.

His major contribution was the idea that pathologic reactions were reactions of cells. As well as pathologist, teacher and experimenter he had a great interest in physical anthropology, in public and industrial health, and in archaeology. He also served in the Reichstag, and vigorously opposed Bismarck.

Virchow showed that lesions were composed of cells.

Julius Cohnheim was born at Demmin in Pomerania, and trained in Wurzburg and Berlin, being latterly a pupil of Virchow. He was successively Professor of Pathology in Kiel, Breslau and Leipsic. His major contributions were in experimental pathology, and in particular in demonstrating that inflammation was an active dynamic process. He described the diapedesis of leucocytes as follows:

Cohnheim showed that lesions were changing dynamic phenomena.

William Boyd trained in medicine in Edinburgh and was Professor of Pathology successively in the Universities of Manitoba, Toronto and British Columbia. He wrote textbooks which related clinical; disease to autopsy findings in lucid readable English. These books were popular world-wide as undergraduate and post-graduate medical texts, and helped to give the Manitoba Medical School an international reputation in the 1930's.

Boyd, William. A Textbook of Pathology: an Introduction to Medicine. Philadelphia: Lea and Febiger, 1932.