Graphic illustrations of abortion and the diseases of menstruation / Consisting of Twelve Plates from Drawings Engraved on Stone, and Coloured by Mr. J. Perry, and Two Copper-plates from the Philosophical Transactions, Coloured by the Same Artist. the Whole Representing Forty-five Specimens of Aborted Ova and Adventitious Productions of the Uterus, With Preliminary Observations, Explanations of the Figures and Remarks, Anatomical and Physiological.

by A. B. Granville

Fig. 20. Ovum tuberculosum.

(Aborted at four months and a half after menstruation.)

I do not apply to the term tuberculosum the more usual meaning, but by it I wish to imply that there are in the structure of this Ovum a great many small swellings like tubercles, some of which are larger than the rest, and not a few of them granular, while others present a great variety in their configuration. All of them have very prominent blood vessels running across their surface, which, while the preparation was still very recent, exhibited a very florid tint. In this state, the specimen was submitted to Mr. Pearsall, late of the Royal Institution, who is very well skilled in the art of sketching and colouring, and still more so in science, and who undertook very kindly to draw it for me. The drawing corrected by Mr. Perry, was afterwards transferred by that gentleman on stone for the present work.

The tubercles are sub-amnionic, and the presence of these morbid accretions will settle the question of the vascularity of the inner, or as I call it, the secreting membrane (amnion) in the human Ovum. That the transparent membranes of the human Ovum are vascular, has been supposed from mere analogy to what we observe in other viviparous animals, particularly of the larger class of quadrupeds; but no proof has ever been adduced of the reality of such a fact, for no anatomist ever succeeded in injecting the supposed vessels of those involucra. What art has failed in demonstrating however, nature has shewn quite manifest in its career of disease. And thus it is that morbid anatomy, besides its more direct effect of teaching us the nature of diseases, produces the no less beneficial consequence to those who carefully investigate it, of unravelling structures which from their minuteness in the normal condition would have escaped detection.

Look at the figure of the fœtus in this Ovum, see how its growth has been checked!—In size it represents an embryo scarcely five weeks old—yet the Ovum came away at four months and a half from a patient whom I was engaged to attend in her confinement. Examine the cord; it is like the amnionic vessels, distended with florid blood.