Lectures on the sympathetic innervation of striated muscle by the late John Irvine Hunter : delivered at University College, London by G. Elliot Smith.

  • John Irvine Hunter
Date:
1925
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Lectures on the sympathetic innervation of striated muscle by the late John Irvine Hunter : delivered at University College, London by G. Elliot Smith. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    INTRO] )UOTORY NOTE. When Professor Hunter arrived in England last November lie was invited by tlie University of London to give three advanced lectures in anatomy, which were to have been delivered in the second week of December: but the large audience that assembled to hear the first lecture were informed of the grave illness to which he succumbed two days later (see British Medical Journal, December 20th, 1924). He had been looking forward with the keenest interest to the delivery of these lectures, because they would have provided him the opportunity for clearing away the mis¬ understanding of his work and for demonstrating the adequacy and reliability of his evidence and the inferences he had drawn from it. In particular he was anxious to explain the scientific principles that should guide the surgeon in the selection of patients for the operation that he had devised (in collaboration with Dr. Norman Royle) for the relief of certain patients subject to spastic para¬ plegia—namely, those whose voluntary control of muscular actions was unimpaired except for the interference resulting from an exaggeration of what Sherrington calls “ plastic tone and it had been his intention to describe the surgical procedure in so far as the reasons for the choice of the rami to be cut were concerned. In the third lecture he proposed to discuss the discordant conclusions that had been drawn by different physiologists and surgeons respectively from their experiments (espe¬ cially in the cat) and operations on the sympathetic in human patients, and to give the explanation of this apparent lack of consistency. Finally, he intended to deal with the wider scientific bearings of his anatomical and experimental researches, and the possibilities thus opened up for promising investi- Vli