History
Donald O. Castell first described his sign in the 1967 paper, “The Spleen Percussion Sign” published in Annals of Internal Medicine. Castell, a George Washington Medical School graduate, is also a Navy-trained gastroenterologist. While stationed at the Great Lakes naval base in northern Illinois, Castell studied 20 male patients, 10 of whom had a positive percussion sign and 10 patient controls with negative percussion signs. The spleen of each patient was then quantitatively measured using chromium-labeled erythrocytes and radioisotope photoscan of the spleen. Castell showed those patients in the control group had a mean spleen size of 75 cm2 with a range of 57 cm2 to 75 cm2, while those who had a positive percussion sign had a mean spleen size of 93 cm2 with a range of 77 cm2 to 120 cm2. Castell concluded that his technique of spleen percussion was thus useful in identifying “slight to moderate degrees of splenic enlargement” and, as a result, constituted a “valuable diagnostic technique.”
Read more about this topic: Castell's Sign
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“English history is all about men liking their fathers, and American history is all about men hating their fathers and trying to burn down everything they ever did.”
—Malcolm Bradbury (b. 1932)
“It’s a very delicate surgical operation—to cut out the heart without killing the patient. The history of our country, however, is a very tough old patient, and we’ll do the best we can.”
—Dudley Nichols, U.S. screenwriter. Jean Renoir. Sorel (Philip Merivale)
“We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.”
—José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955)