Title: Addison and the white corpuscles An aspect of Nine

Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL. Very Good/Very Good. 1972. First Edition. Hard Cover. 8vo 0854840117 Dust jacket complete, unclipped. Original cloth boards with bright gilt titling on spine. Nea name and date on ffep. 236 pages clean and tight. WILLIAM ADDISON (I8o2---I88I) survives obscurely in histories of medicine today as a fore-runner of Cohnheirn in describing the outward passage of white blood cells through the intact walls of small blood-vessels during the inflammatory process. Based on a thorough survey of relevant English, French and German medical and biological literature of the mid-nineteenth century, as well as on an analysis of all of Addison's writings, this book presents a quite different picture of his role. Addison was involved peripherally in two of the revolutions of biological science that took place in the nineteenth century, the first when the `fibre' theory of plant and animal structure yielded to the cell theory as originally promulgated, and the second when the belief that animal cells arose de novo from an amorphous blastema yielded to the sweeping claim that all cells arose from pre-existing cells. These revolutions carried with them a necessity for re-thinking ideas of growth, regeneration and repair, and of nutritive, inflammatory and neoplastic processes. The white blood cells occupied a pivotal place in Addison's elaborately worked out physiological and pathological scheme of things. Now thought of as concerned solely with inflammatory and immune processes, the white blood cells had once been ascribed a role in tissue nutrition by German and French investigators. .