l68 PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. [aNNO 1685. 



Account of a Shell* found in one of the Kidneys of a Woman. By Dr. Peirce, 



of Bath. N° 171, p. 1018. 



A gentlewoman of about 28 years of age, very fat and corpulent, after having 

 been long troubled with frequent and sometimes violent vomitings, fell at 

 length into a fever, which had no very ill symptoms at first, yet in a few days 

 she died suddenly. For the satisfaction of her relations the body was opened ; 

 the lower region being first examined, I quickly found what might account for 

 her long vomiting, and perhaps her fever and death too, viz. an ulcer in the 

 pancreas, which had sphacelated some part of the stomach and bowels. Exa- 

 mining the state of the kidneys, they were found covered with a prodigious 

 quantity of fat; which removing with my hand, and reaching one of the kid- 

 neys, I felt something prick my finger in the lower part, where the ureter is 

 inserted : I presently concluded it to be a stone, and kept hold of it till I made 

 my way to it with my knife, and took it out, with an abundance of mucous 

 bloody matter about it. Opening the kidneys, I found not so much as gravel, 

 much less any stone, in either of them : on further examination of this matter, 

 supposed to be a stone, by washing off the mucus from about it, I found it to 

 be a small shell, very finely wrought; in the hollow of it there was a mucous 

 matter, not at all unlike the substance of a snail as to consistence ;-|- but of a 

 bloody colour. 



Fig, 1, pi. 5, represents the shell in its true size. Fig. 1, shows the same 

 shell somewhat magnified. Those indented checkers on it, are alternately a 

 little depressed and raised, and are very exactly wrought. There are 6 or 7 

 spiral lines or rounds, in the turban. 



Bath, Jpril llth, l685. 



Gualteri CharltoniX Inquisitio Physica de Causis Catameniorum, et Uteri Rheu- 

 matismo. Lond. l685. Bvo. N° 171, p. 1020. 



A treatise on the human uterus, its functions, diseases, &c. It is far from the 

 best of Dr. Charlton's works. 



* A calculus resembling a shell. 



t If the patient had lived longer this " mucous matter, not unlike the substance of a snail," would 

 probably have concreted to a stony hardness lilce the outer part, or supposed testaceous covering. 



t Walther Charleton was a physician of considerable renown in the 17th century. He was a native 

 of Somersetshire, and studied at Oxford, where he took his doctor's degree in 1()42. He was an 

 early member of the Royal Society, and was physician to Charles I. and II. He practised for many 

 years in London, but at length retired to the Isle of Jersey. He died 1707. To his medical and 

 physiological writings belong, in addition to the treatise abovementioned, the following: Spiritus 

 Goreoneus sive de causis, signis et sanatione lithiaseos; Exercitationes Pathologicae; Anatomical 

 Lectures • Tractatus de Scorbuto ; and, the most celebrated of all, his CEconomia animalis. 



