BRAIN TUMORS; A STUDY OF CLINICAL AND POST-MORTEM RECORDS BEARING ON THEIR OPERABILITY AND THEIR SYMPTOMATOLOGY
George Lincoln Walton, Walter E. Paul · The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease · 1905
Statistics dividing autopsied cases of brain tumor into operable and inoperable allow the personal equation of the col¬ lector so great a range that uniformity of results can hardly be expected.The estimates of the writers who have studied the subject from this point of view vary materially.The average estimate of the various collectors as tabulated by Knapp2 in 1899 was about 11%.The individual estimates in the table ranged from Seidel's3 (3%) to Dana's4 This difference is doubtless due in some degree to the personal equa¬ tion.This element may be lessened by dividing the autopsied cases into three instead of two classes, namely into the oper¬ able, the inoperable, and the doubtful, and limiting the desig¬ nation operable to those cases in which lasting relief might be expected from the operation.Into the operable cases will fall the primary, accessible, well defined tumors which may be removed without cutting into brain tissue.Such tumors spring, in the great majority of cases, from the dura, many of them being designated endotheliomata, a term including the