On railway and other injuries of the nervous system / by John Eric Erichsen.

  • John Eric Erichsen
Date:
1866
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On railway and other injuries of the nervous system / by John Eric Erichsen. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by UCL Library Services. The original may be consulted at UCL (University College London)

    21/162 page 9
    their business to elicit the Truth, and to place the cause of their Client in the best possible light, by questioning the accuracy of your facts and by sifting the validity of the opinions you have deduced from them. I purpose illustrating these Lectures by Cases drawn from my own Practice, and by a reference to a few of the more interesting published cases that bear upon the subject. In doing so, I shall confine myself to the detail of a few selected instances. It would be as useless, as it would be tedious, to mul- ti]}ly them to any great extent, as they all present very analogous trains of symptoms and phenomena. I will not confine my illustrations to cases drawn from Railway Accidents only, but will show you that pre- cisely the same effects may result from other and more ordinary injuries of civil life. It must, how- ever, be obvious to you all, that in no ordinary acci- dent can the shock be so great as in those that occur on Railways. The rapidity of the movement, the momentum of the person injured, the suddenness of its arrest, the helplessness of the sufferers, and the natural perturbation of mind that must disturb the bravest, are all circumstances that of a necessity greatly increase the severity of the resulting injury to the nervous system, and that justly cause these cases to be considered as somewhat exceptional from ordinary accidents. This has actually led some surgeons to designate that peculiar affection of the Spine that is met with in these cases as the rail- way spine.
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3