The William Sydney Thayer and Susan Read Thayer lectures in clinical medicine : Lecture 1, The hereditary factor in some diseases of the haemopoietic system. Lecture 2, Some diseases in the Jewish race / by Sir Humphry Rolleston Bart., K.C.B., M.D., Regius Professor of Physic in the University of Cambridge.

  • Rolleston, Humphry Davy, Sir, 1862-1944
Date:
[1928?]
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: The William Sydney Thayer and Susan Read Thayer lectures in clinical medicine : Lecture 1, The hereditary factor in some diseases of the haemopoietic system. Lecture 2, Some diseases in the Jewish race / by Sir Humphry Rolleston Bart., K.C.B., M.D., Regius Professor of Physic in the University of Cambridge. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    of the extremities (137 out of Silbert’s 258 cases). A leucocytosis has been recorded in the acute phase (Thomas), but Jablons contested this. It specially attacks Jews in Russia, Poland, and also in Galicia, Rumania, and European Turkey, and immigrants in America, Eng¬ land and elsewhere. Rich are affected as well as poor. The process is an inflammatory thrombosis involving not only the larger arteries and veins, but their finest branches and even the capil¬ laries (Constam). It shows (1) an acute inflammatory lesion with occlusive thrombosis and the formation of miliary foci resembling tubercles or minute abscesses with giant-cells (Buerger (1917)); these giant cells, which Buerger (1920) regarded as abortive attempts on the part of angioblasts to organize an infective focus, were not found in a British case published by Marnoch and MacRae; and in their British cases Telford and Stopford described infiltrating cells as lymphocytes and not polymorphonuclears; (2) later organization of the clot with disappearance of the inflammatory and giant-celled foci, and canalization; (3) the formation of fibrous tissue in the ad¬ ventitia which binds together the artery, vein, and nerves; micro¬ scopically, the nutrient arteries of the nerves may be involved (Mar¬ noch and MacRae). This might account for vasomotor phenomena which may make the diagnosis from Raynaud’s disease difficult (Allen and Brown). Bacteriological examination has so far failed to estab¬ lish a microbic cause, though Rabinowitz described a Gram-negative beaded bacillus which produced similar lesions in rabbits. Buerger and Weber, with much experience of poor Russian and Polish Jews in the East End of London, both regarded it as a disease of Jews; this opinion has been criticized on the ground that Buerger’s statistics were mainly based on observations at a Jewish Hospital. Buerger, however, quotes 120 cases collected in Japan between 1900 and 1921 (Koyano), and in a letter to Boyer and Thibault states that he has seen about 20 cases in American Christians. It is said to be relatively common among the yellow races, and in China (Whyte; Meleney and Miller). The questions of its peculiar racial incidence and whether or not it really differs from obliterative arteritis in gen¬ tiles have been much discussed. Gilbert and Coury regarded it as sharply defined from other forms of chronic obliterative arteritis, not only clinically but pathologically; and Sicard, who shared this view,