Morphological studies of human gallbladder

Abstract

I tried to make it clear three dimensional picture of the smooth muscle of the human gallbladder at first, and found a connection between the smooth muscle and the autonomic nerves in the wall. At autopsy the gallbladder without lesion was collected from 15 males and 7 females died of apoplexy, head injury or myocardial infarction. These material was fixed 10% neural formalin, impregnated into Masson Trichrome for smooth muscle, and modified Golgi method for nerve fivers, embeded in celloidin. I laid a picture after another after tracing serial tangential section of 8 micron by using camera lucida, and made three dimensional picture. In autonomic nerve in the wall three dimensional sections of 100-150 micron were made and observed with light microscope. Three dimensional muscle structure showed monounit structure, having meshwork structure from mucosal area to serous one. It was gratified the condition of the gallbladder contraction to illustrate a series of connection from mucosal aspect to serous one. Many fine nerve fivers were found forming plexuses in the subserous layer, muscular layer and mucosa. There was close relationship between smooth muscle and intramural nerve fibers, which especially distributed into meshwork structure of muscle. I could find morphological relation among the layers, such as three main plexuses. It was suggested that subserous plexus had extrinsic nature.