Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Medico-Chirurgical Review and Journal of Practical Medicine, Vol. 22: 1st of October, 1834, to 31st of March, 1835
Though the relations of many parts of the system are still so mysterious, and the sympathies so complete and extraordinary as to defy all explanation by nervous communication, much may in this way be understood, especially of the spinal cord and its connexions. Its physiology has been so very much elu cidated by late experiments, that a little consideration would suggest to us the complaints likely to be produced by affections of any individual portion of it. From its continuity with the brain (that part to which intellectual actions have been assigned), and their known reciprocal sympathies, we should expect its dis eases would excite many symptomatic disorders of that organ. As pain, vertigo, delirium, &c., which we shall find not uncommon. As the origin of all sensa tion and motion, we might anticipate simply painful, or spasmodic, or paralytic affections in any part of the body, or that general loss of feeling and motion in which we sometimes see persons lie, inanimate and powerless; the body still, the eyes fixed, the functions of respiration carried on imperceptibly, yet fully sensible of all that is going on around them. As it includes the origin of the fifth pair, which is found to be essentially necessary to every organ of sense, except sight, in the exercise of its functions, and even to sight to be accessory, irritation or disease near the trunks of that nerve should induce disturbance of the functions of the senses, or temporary paralysis of all or any of them, or pain ful a?fections of the extremities of these nerves themselves, as in the orbital, or facial, or alveolar branches. As the seat of the respiratory functions, we should be inclined to attribute to its disorder many complaints of the respiratory sys tem. Near to the origin of the fifth are the roots of the respiratory nerves, the glosso-pliaryngeal, the eighth pair, the spinal accessory, the phrenic; derange ment or irritation of which should occasion affections of the throat, respiratory muscles, lungs, diaphragm, and stomach; loss or change of voice, hoarseness; crowing, croupy, or wheezing respiration; barking, cough, globus hystericus, spasms of the chest or stomach, difficult deglutition, hiccough, weeping, crying, laughing, &c. Irritation at the root of the cervical nerves might induce, by communication, any of the foregoing symptoms, or occasion pain, stiffness, ri gidity, or spasm of the muscles of the neck or arm, or numbness or paralysis. To irritation at the origin of the dorsal neri'es we might attribute oppression, palpitation, pain in the anterior of the chest or stomach, or sides; and, at the origin of the lumbar nerves, abdominal tenderness, colic, constipation, pains in the loins, hips, extremities, with disorder or paralysis of the bladder, or of the lower limbs.
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