Volume 2

On spasm, languor, palsy, and other disorders, termed nervous, of the muscular system / by James Arthur Wilson.

  • Wilson, James Arthur, 1795-1882.
Date:
1843
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On spasm, languor, palsy, and other disorders, termed nervous, of the muscular system / by James Arthur Wilson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    muscles is estimated, not so much by the actual © severity of the symptoms, as by the nature of the function to which the affected muscles minister. Generally speaking, disorders of the muscular structure are urgent, in the degree in which they concern the business of the pulse and the breath. Great interest also attaches to them from the evidence which they afford of disturbance in the general health or of the progress of internal organic disease. Diseases affecting the organization of the brain or spinal marrow, are recognised principally by inefficiency in the muscles which are held by their nerves in connexion with the damaged portion of the central nervous structures. There is no form of constitutional illness, no alter- ation effected by disease in any of the internal organs of the body, which does not find its illustration in a corresponding state of the function of the voluntary muscles. Of this principle in practical medicine, fever and poison in their varieties afford the constant proof. Fever, among its very first effects, working by the blood upon the flesh, deprives the voluntary muscles of their tone and healthy power of con- traction. The prostration of strength, utter and sudden, with which in some cases it begins—the tossing rest- lessness, the cataleptic stillness of its later periods— the unconscious struggles that mark the fatal close of the disease, are all so many expressions by the muscle of the poison in operation through the system. In prognosis the most of what we learn from the face is taught to us by its muscles. Thus, from the evi- dence, in context with other symptoms, of contractile
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