Senile hypertrophy and senile atrophy of the skull / by George Murray Humphry.

  • Humphry, George Murray, Sir, 1820-1896.
Date:
1890
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Senile hypertrophy and senile atrophy of the skull / by George Murray Humphry. 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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    19| inches, weig'lis 11^ oz. A third, from a very aged female, with the lower jaw, weighs 14 oz., the greatest circumference being 20£ inches. The entire skeleton of this person weighs only 88 oz., though it is evidently that of a fine person, inasmuch as it measures 5 feet 8 inches, the thigh-bones measuring 18j inches and the angles of the neck with the shaft being 130°. What are the causes which determine the incidence of one or the other of these very opposite changes—increase of thickness, with commonly increase of density and weight, on the one hand, and decrease of thickness, with decrease of weight, ou the other hand—I cannot tell. Though commonly, as I have said, the atrophic thinning and removal of the outer table, affects the whole of the calvarial part of the skull in an equal, or nearly equal, manner, yet in some instances it does so very unequally. It has an especial tendency to attack symmetrically the parietal bones between their sagittal or mesial parts aud the parietal protuberances, causing those remarkable de- pressions of which specimens are to be found in most mu- seums, and of which there are nine in the museum at Cambridge and four in the College of Surgeons, one of the latter being a well-formed edentulous Egyptian and one a Wallachian gipsy woman, aged 82, from the Barnard-Davis Collection.1 They present, on the whole, much simi- larity, being usually ovoid, measuring three or four inches from before backwards and two or three transversely. At the deepest or middle part the inner layer of the bone may be exposed, reduced to extreme thinness or even quite removed, but it is never, so far as I have seen, indented— that is to say, the inner contour of the skull-wall is not altered. This is shown in PI. IV, figs. 3 and 4. The surface is smooth, though in a few instances it is slightly^ rough and marked by vascular foramina ; and in the speci- men from which PI. IV, fig. 4, is taken it is traversed by 1 These were described by Mr. Eve at the Pathological Society (‘ Lancet,’ February 22nd, 1890, p. 404). One of the Cambridge specimens is an edentu- lous ancient Egyptian skull.