So-called 'concussion of the spine' in railway injuries / by John G. Johnson.

  • Johnson, John George.
Date:
[1883?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: So-called 'concussion of the spine' in railway injuries / by John G. Johnson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    [Reprint from Medico-Legal Journal.] CONCUSSION OF THE SPINE IN RAILWAY By John G. Johnson, M. D., Surgeon to the Union Ferry Co.. Brooklyn—Prospect Park and Coney Island Railroad Co.—Brooklyn, Flatbush and Coney Island Railroad Co.—Brooklyn City Railroad Co.—New York and Brooklyn Bridge, etc., etc. In 1866 an able and rising surgeon of England published a book of his triumphs in a new specialty he had worked up for himself, as a personal damage surgeon against railroad corporations, in a new disease that he had discovered, result- ing from the mighty power of steam in railway concussions upon the nervous system of human beings. The ingenuity and plausibility with which his book was written sp ke more for his skill as a partisan than did the contents appear as that of a searcher after truth. Case after case is quoted, with the enormous verdicts that he had won, though the most eminent men in the profession were arrayed against him. The particulars of the cases are summed up, and the points made by him in these cases, and the doubts and uncertainties that these parties would ever be able to discharge their duties to their families or society were fully insisted on ; while the strong probability that they might pass the remainder of their days as days of misery and nights as nights of agony, until the grave should take to itself these blighted lives, were por- trayed in vividness of language that well might excite the * Read before tbe Medico-Legal Society, December 6, 1883.