Selected essays and monographs : translations and reprints from various sources.

Date:
1897
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Selected essays and monographs : translations and reprints from various sources. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    51/476 (page 41)
    disturbances, manifesting themselves by a slowing of the peripheral circulation and coldness of the extremities, so that the use of the thermometer proves the lowering of the local temperature to the extent of about one degree ; at the same time the extremities are swollen, cyanosed, with a violet tint, showing the signs of local asphyxia. In other cases, on the contrary, intense redness of the extremities has been noted, with swelling, especially well-marked in the fingers, and accompanied by elevation of local temperature. It is to these circulatory troubles that we must doubtless attribute the strange sensations which the patients experience. Some experience a constant feeling of cold, limited either to a single region of the body, or extending over a large area of the skin; others experience sensations of heat, or even smarting of the most painful character. These alterations in the temperature sensation may be very changeable even in the same individual, and are especially common among the early symptoms of syringomyelia. At a slightly more advanced stage vaso-motor paralysis produces a lasting redness of the skin as a consequence of even insignificant mechanical irritation, a phenomenon which is naturally comparable to the erythema so distinctive of meningeal inflammation. The cutaneous irritability is sometimes so striking that characters drawn on the skin with a blunt point are reproduced in relief, and may continue for several hours. This phenomenon has been observed by Schultze, Fiirstner, and twice by Roth, and is quite analogous to what Dujardin-Beaumetz has described under the name of “ l’homme autographique.” With this knowledge of the condition of the vaso-motor nervous system it may be readily understood how patients suffering from syringomyelia must be predisposed to certain erythemata, to irritation of the skin, and to various urticarial eruptions. There has also been described the occurrence of conditions of oedema, and these have been studied especially by Remak.* I his writer makes the observation that oedema is not an uncommon occurrence in various forms of paralysis, in fact that, so far as oedema of nervous origin is concerned, it is rarely found in the absence of paralysis. This phenomenon has, however, been * Remak, Berliner klin. Wochenschrift, 1889.