The autonomic nervous system / by J.N. Langley.

  • John Newport Langley
Date:
1921-
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The autonomic nervous system / by J.N. Langley. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    sending vasoconstrictor fibres to the cervical sympa¬ thetic. Bever and Bezold, Boehm and Nussbaum, who investigated the origin of sympathetic cardiac accelerator fibres, considered them to arise in part from the lower cervical nerves. On the other hand the evidence was against the lower lumbar or sacral nerves sending either vaso-motor or secretory fibres to the limbs by way of the sympathetic, and the question at issue was mainly the presence or absence of vaso-motor and secretory fibres taking a direct course in the spinal nerves. The lower lumbar and sacral nerves were supposed to send fibres to the viscera by way of the sympathetic chain, but there was no satisfactory evidence for this. Gaskell (1886) approached the subject from a histological and morphological standpoint. He found in the dog that bundles of small nerve fibres i*8 to 3-6/4 in diameter occurred in the anterior roots of those nerves which had white rami, but not in the anterior roots of the nerves which had grey rami, except in the case of the sacral nerves from which the nervus erigens arose, and this had no connexion with the sympathetic chain. The white rami—as had been shown by Bidder and Volkmann and others—con¬ sisted mainly of similar small medullated fibres. On tracing the grey rami towards the spinal cord he found no non-medullated fibres in the roots, inside the dura mater; the few non-medullated fibres found more peripherally he considered ran to the dura mater and thence to the blood vessels of the cord. A somewhat similar result and conclusion had been arrived at by Beck in man. He described a few “gela¬ tinous” fibres in the roots, not traceable to the cord, but seeming to run to the blood vessels. (Todd and Bowman’s Physiological Anat. and Physiol, of Man, 2, p. 132, 1859,
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