34 TERMINATIONS OF INFLAJIMATION. 



These, then, are the component parts of good, healthy, or 

 laudable pus, showing a benign form of inflammation, and 

 that the disease is going on regularly and promises a for- 

 tunate issue. Wlien, however, the process deviates from the 

 usual course in an animal otherwise healthy, variations are 

 found in the cells, with multiform mixtures of withered cells ; 

 molecular and fatty matter; escaped and shrivelled nuclei, 

 blood corpuscles, and fragments of fibrogenous material; the 

 liquor puris is thin, liquid, or watery, and the pus is then 

 said to be ichorous. When the colouring matter of the blood 

 is mixed with it, it is called sanies, or sanious pus. 



]\Iany chemical and vital changes are found to bring about 

 a decomposition in pus while yet in contact with living parts, 

 although it is probable that germs in the atmosphere, or gases 

 formed within the body, may have to do with the change ; but 

 phosphuretted and sulphuretted hydrogen and ammonia will be 

 found frequently developed in abscesses, especially if the pus be 

 in contact with bone, or near the alimentary canal, or in the foot : 

 the smell is then most offensive ; it is then called fontid pus. 

 Pus may also contain certain specific properties ; that is to say, 

 it may be impregnated with certain specific poisons, as that of 

 glanders, variola, &c. 



Healthy or laudable pus has no smell, except that peculiar 

 to the animal in which it may exist ; it has an alkaline 

 reaction when freshly drawn from an abscess, but it readily 

 becomes acid from the generation of what is supposed to be 

 lactic acid. 



It will be gathered from the foregoing remarks that the 

 boundary or wall of an abscess consists of newly formed areolar 

 tissue, which has maintained the firmness and solidity of the 

 part by activity of nuclear growth. There is sometimes found 

 to be a thin, opaque, yellowish-white layer, easily detached, 

 separating the suppuration from the denser part. This has 

 been called pyogenic membrane, from the supposition that its 

 function is to secrete the pus ; whereas the cells of the denser 

 part are — by premature and continuous development — ^growing 

 into pus cells ; that is to say, there is no secretion of pus by 

 any membrane, but a continual formation of it by proliferation 

 of the cells proper to the part. 



When suppuration takes place in the cavities of the body, it 



