On the contractility or irritability of the muscles of paralysed limbs, and their excitability by the galvanic current, in comparison with the corresponding muscles of healthy limbs / by Robert Bentley Todd.

  • Robert Bentley Todd
Date:
[1847]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the contractility or irritability of the muscles of paralysed limbs, and their excitability by the galvanic current, in comparison with the corresponding muscles of healthy limbs / by Robert Bentley Todd. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    as an electric discharge, which can excite the nervous force in the nerve of a frog's leg,—and that these phenomena are in the dii'ect ratio of the nutritive actions of the muscle, —they fail when the changes of nutrition are slow and im- perfect or vitiated, and they are distinct and easUy demon- strable when the muscles are well nourished. And when we take into account the beautiful and complicated structure of muscle, which modern research has so well developed,—when, likewise, we remember its complex and peculiar chemical constitution, it is impossible to refer the force which muscles can develope to any other source than its own tissue and the chemical and physical changes of which it is the seat. The two tissues, muscle and nerve, and the forces wliich they re- spectively develope, are, no doubt, nearly allied, and probably so far mutually dependent, that the imperfect nutrition of either wotdd exert an unfavourable influence upon the other. It is in vain to found any distinction between cerebral and spinal palsy, upon any difference that may exist between the paralysed and healthy muscles as to their excitability by gal- vanism. The very same states of muscle and of nerve exist in spinal palsies as in cerebral. There is this difference, how- ever ; that as in spinal palsy the nerves are more nearly re- lated to the seat of lesion, sometimes, indeed, implanted in it, they participate more directly and, therefore, more completely in the effects of the lesion than in cerebral palsy; and when these effects are depressing, the nervous force is more com- pletely depressed, or when they are irritant, the nervous force is more exalted, in spinal than in cerebral palsies. In a case of intra-spinal disease, which occurred about twelve months ago in King's College Hospital, the lower extremities were in a state of continued tonic contraction more intense than I had ever seen them in tetanus. These muscles responded readily and very forcibly to the galvanic stimulus. Yet the influence of the will was completely withdi'awn from them, and the paralysis of voluntary motion and of sensation was complete. Muscular rigidity to a less degree is by no means uncommon in spinal palsy.
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