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The cerebral blood-vessels in health and disease. By Prof. H. Obersteiner (Vienna). Brain 1884: 7; 289–309 (Translated from the original manuscript by C.E. Beevor, MD).
Cambridge
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Writing in the 1880s, advances in microscopy and the preservation and staining of tissue made over the previous decade have enabled the fine structure and elements of animal and human tissue to be described in health ...‘but also revealed an increasing number of changes, which denote the impress of a pathological condition’. Sceptics have challenged the status of certain so-called pathological features arguing that these may be variations of normal structure, non-specific alterations that accompany ageing or other ‘physiological’ processes, or artefacts of tissue handling. Indeed, in his previous work on the cerebral vasculature—motivated by the consideration that ‘the nervous elements, and especially the ganglion cells, are more sensitive than any other tissues to disturbances of their normal nutrition’—Professor Obersteiner (Fig. 1) has ‘frequently found that the occurrence of vessels considered to be diseased, [has] afterwards been found present, and never absent, in every healthy brain ... such