Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: The nervous system and its functions / by Herbert Mayo. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.
52/206 (page 38)
![The most remarkable of these, and the first of the series, was a paper piibhshed in the Philosophical Transactions for 1821. In this ehaborate essay it is evident that Sir Charles Bell had as yet made no advance towards the conception of different nerves being appro- priated to sense and motion. The object of the paper is to shew, that in addition to the nerves of sensation and voluntary motion, (both which functions he together attributed to the same nerves,) there exists a peculiar system, the superadded or respiratoiy, which ministers to breathing, and to the expression of emotion. To the nerves of this supposed class he afterwards hypothetically attributed a spe- cial origin in what he termed the respiratory tract of the medulla oblongata and spinal cord. The nerves of this class he su]3posed to com- prise the hard portion of the seventh, the eighth, the spinal accessory, the phrenic, and the branch of the axillary plexus, which sup- phes the serratus major. Of these he more especially dwelt upon the hard portion of the seventh as having furnished experimental proof of the reality of his special system of super- added or respiratory nerves, and he described the experiments which he considered to have made his discovery good. The announcement of these new views was very favourably received by physiolo-](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21941841_0052.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
