The influence of alcohol and other drugs on fatigue : the Croonian lectures delivered at the Royal College of Physicians in 1906 / by W.H.R. Rivers.

  • William Halse Rivers Rivers
Date:
1908
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The influence of alcohol and other drugs on fatigue : the Croonian lectures delivered at the Royal College of Physicians in 1906 / by W.H.R. Rivers. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    sense of fatigue, diminishing those unpleasant sensations which act as our natural warnings that we are approaching the limits of most favourable activity of our organs. It is obvious that a drug which acts in this way would not be exerting a real beneficial action in fatigue, but would be rather acting as an accelerator of exhaustion, and the problem whether certain drugs act in this way will be one of the questions to be considered in these lectures. Muscular Fatigue. In nearly all the work which has been done on the action «/ of drugs in muscular fatigue Mosso’s ergograph has been used, either in its original form or with various modifications. Objections have been made that this method does not give a true picture of the normal course of fatigue, and, so far as the single ergogram is concerned, there can be no doubt that this is true. It is now known that the typical Mosso’s ergogram is the resultant of a very special set of conditions working together. It has been shown by Treves1 that the condition of complete exhaustion which occurs at the end of the ergo¬ gram is only apparent, and that the weight has only to be somewhat diminished for the finger to become again capable of contractions equal in extent to those of the wholly un¬ fatigued condition. The ergogram of Mosso only occurs with a constant weight near the limit of the powers of the subject of the experiment. Treves2 has devised a method of ergography in which the weight can be easily varied, and he has called this the method with variable weight, as opposed to the method with constant weight of Mosso. He suggests that the true course of muscular fatigue would be represented by a curve showing the amounts of the successive diminutions of the weight—a curve which falls most rapidly at first and then more slowly, 1 Arch. ital. de Biol., 1898, t. xxix., p. 157, and t. xxx., p. 1. Also Arcli. f. d. ges. Physiol., 1902, Bd. lxxxviii., S. 7. 2 Arch. ital. de Biol., 1901, t. xxxvi., p. 44. 1—2
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