REMARKS ON THE ELECTRONMICROSCOPICAL APPEARANCES OF BRAIN TUMOURS.

Abstract

When I first heard that this Symposium was going to take place I was working and in fact we had been working for some time on the electronmicroscopy of the intramuscular nerve endings and on cutaneous nerves taken at biopsy. I told Dr. Zulch that I was of course as a neuropathologist extremely interest in cerebral tumours and as an expression of gratitude for the chance to come and hear what people said during the Symposium, I would carry out electronmicroscopy on some cerebral tumours for him. Now, I am sure you realize how very difficult it is to switch from the tissue that you are most interested in to another and just as we were starting to collect some cerebral tumour material to study with the electronmicroscope, we ran into some domestic difficulties in the laboratory so I am only able to show you our first preparations, but rather than back out of my commitment and leave the Symposium without reference being made to electronmicroscopy and its potential value for you, I thought the best thing to do would be to make a survey of the work which has been done by other electronmicrocopists on cerebral tumours so you could see the value of the method. When I went through the literature I found that the task was much easier than I had anticipated because on the one hand electronmieroscopic technique has developed so rapidly that the one or two early attempts at carrying out these studies did not really give us anything of interest and secondly even in recent years as far as published work is concerned almost no one has occupied himself with this matter.