The hysterical element in orthopædic surgery / by Newton M. Shaffer.

  • Newton Melman Shaffer
Date:
1880
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The hysterical element in orthopædic surgery / by Newton M. Shaffer. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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    tivity of sensation, and an easily excited reflex move- ment—especially if complicated by precocity in the child, or mental exhaustion in the adult, a long and intricate series of symptoms may follow, including disturbed mus cular action, varying from the most extensive and general convulsion to the semi-tetanized muscles of one of the extremities, and from an apparent hemiplegia to the loss of power over a group of flexors. If these facts be appre- ciated, we can wholly coincide with Tuke when he says that there is no sensation, whether general or special, excited by agents acting upon the body from without, which cannot be excited also from within by emotional states. * And to this statement we may add: There is no articular deformity depending upon chronic inflam- mation or disturbed muscular action—be it either loss of power or contraction—which cannot be simulated, and not unfrequently is simulated in the conditions which I have briefly attempted to describe. The early writers on diseases of the joints fail to mention the existence of that variety of articular deformity which is associated with a more or less marked h}'sterical diathesis. Since the time, however, that Brodie called attention to the circumstance that many serious pathological conditions might be closely simulated by the condition which Skeyf recognises but does not name, except to call it Hysteria, which Paget \ more recently describes as Neuromimesis, and which Esmarch § calls Gclcnkncnrosc, the fact that these peculiar disturbances of the nervous system may successfully imitate the more serious deformities has been recognized ; though, strange as it may seem, some of the more recent and pretentious works on the subject of joint * Op. cit. page 146. \ Lectures on Hysteria, New York, 1867. :|: Clinical Lectures and Essays, New York, 1875. § Ueber Gelcnkneurosen, Kiel, 1872.