resulting gangrene from excess
of inflammatory action has ended in resolution, the deeper tissues not
having been found to be injured. It is only where the tone of the
general system is lowered, through disease, age, or other deteriorating
conditions, that the whole organ is liable to become affected or to
break down.

Boyer, in the tenth volume of his "Treatise on Surgical Affections,"
gives several examples of this affection not due to age: one case was a
person, simultaneously attacked by an adynamic fever and a
blennorrhagia, who suffered from gangrene of the penis; the local and
constitutional disturbance was not high, however, and the patient
escaped with the simple loss of the prepuce.

Another case admitted to the Charite, aged thirty-six, was afflicted
with a blennorrhagia, upon which an attack of low fever supervened. The
penis inflamed, became engorged and livid, and soon gangrenous symptoms
presented themselves, making rapid progress; at first the integument
alone was affected, but later all the structures became implicated and
the penis was completely destroyed, the sloughs detaching themselves in
shreds, leaving a conical stump that healed but slowly.

One case, a young man of twenty, also at the Charite, was admitted with
adynamic fever; a few days after admission the prepuce was observed to
be somewhat inflamed; in spite of all treatment this progressed so
rapidly that the purple discoloration presaged a gangrene, which was not
slow in following; the focus seemed to be at the superior and back
portion of the prepuce; an incision evacuated a quantity of purulent,
serous fluid; the disease, however, extended up the organ as far as its
middle before its actions ceased; the sloughs were then cast off, when
it was found that part of the gland and a portion of the cavernous body
had followed the integument in the general wreck, subjecting the patient
to intolerable pain during micturition. After the recovery from the
fever, the remaining portion of the gland and the mutilated parts of the
cavernous body were amputated to remedy this condition; the patient
subsequently admitted to have had a blennorrhagia at the time of his
admission to the hospital.

The gangrenous action may, in proportion to the low condition of the
patient, be as proportionately rapid. Another case from Boyer, quoted
from the works of Forestus, relates how the whole organ underwent such
speedy disorganization that its liquefied remains