Termination of Inflammation. 289 



of the soft palate and neighboring structures ; coryca, for nasal ca- 

 tarrh; erysipelas for a special inflammation of the skin. 



As above stated inflammation is a local reactive process in which 

 the mechanisms of tlie body underlying its protection from harmful 

 influences and its compensation for disturbances are aroused to an 

 especially intense activity. This defensive and compensatory func- 

 tion exists even in normal conditions, as a vital cellular phenomenon 

 of the animal body. Reactions of the same kind are almost all the 

 time going on in the system ; here and there cells are dying and are 

 being made away with by phagocytosis, and are being replaced by 

 regenerative proliferation. ^Microorganisms are deposited at many 

 points on a mucous membrane in communicating relation with the 

 outside world and are rendered harmless by phagocytosis ; in the 

 stomach and intestinal canal there often accumulate toxic sub- 

 stances, formed from the food, which cause a hyperaemia and 

 are swept away by the increased secretion, or are taken up 

 by the emigrated leucoc}i;es (being quickly rendered inert in 

 the liver) and only transiently excite some of the individual 

 inflammatory phenomena. Insignificant and minor grades of 

 inflammation are thus not infrequently induced, but these are 

 not classed as inflammations. They are regarded as physiological 

 phagocytosis, functional hyperaemia, physiological regeneration, each 

 running its individual course; they are not considered as disturb- 

 ances. We only speak of inflammation when these reactive phe- 

 nomena occur together and in unusually marked degree and when 

 the causative injury or the reactive process itself is productive of 

 functional faults in the affected part. 



Termination of Inflammations. — Since inflammation in many in- 

 stances serves successfully to do away with useless and injurious 

 materials and to restore the injured tissue or at least to replace 

 faults with cicatricial tissue, it may be looked upon as a regulative 

 and defensive effort of important use to the economy. In this adap- 

 tive eft'ort. with much propriety of comparison, the advancing leu- 

 cocvtes mav be likened to mobilized troops or to a body of street 

 cleaners ; but it cannot be said that the cells of the body pursue any 

 fixed plan of procedure always under nervous control, but rather that 

 the whole process is in reality the occurrence, it may be said the 

 accidental occurrence, of phenomena of physiological motility and 

 secretion of living protoplasm excited by external stimuli. The 

 physiological component processes of inflammation are the same as 

 the cellular functions of phagocytosis and secretion which take 

 place in digestion, the result of mechanical and chemical excitation, 



