A contribution to the study of muscular tremor / by Frederick Peterson.

  • Peterson, Frederick, 1859-1938.
Date:
[1888]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A contribution to the study of muscular tremor / by Frederick Peterson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    quency of contraction 6.2 per second. The fingers of a piano player are required to strike 11.2 tones per second in Chopin's Etude, op. 25, No. 2, and 12.3 per second in Czerny's Schule der Fingcrfertigkeit, No. 1. Von Kries thinks that even this speed may be surpassed in short passages. The fastest voluntary movements of the wrist are about eight per second. The octave study,-No. 8, in Chopin's opus 25, requires seven per second, while in the scherzo movement of Schumann's Clavier quartette the left hand must strike the keys rhythmically at the rate of eight times per second. Von Kries thinks that many virtuosos attain to a frequency of eleven per second. He used an instrument in his studies fashioned upon Marey's sphygmograph. If we turn now to pathological conditions we find that the clonic spasms of epilepsy have a rhythm of ten or less per second ; and the ankle clonus may be easily determined to be at the rate of ten per second or less. Some of my tracings of ankle clonus are six per second. The move- ments in nystagmus are very variable, but are usually from one to three or four per second, occasionally too rapid for counting, as the application of any myographic apparatus to the eye is almost impossible. Marie0 examined the tremors of paralysis agitans and Basedow's disease. He found the rate of vibration five per second in the former disease, and eight to nine per second in exophthalmic goitre. Charcot7 pictures two myographic curves, one of multi- ple cerebro-spinal sclerosis and one from paralysis agitans. They are of no particular value, being half diagrammatic. He found the contractions of paralysis agitans to be four to five per second. Ewald8 counted the oscillations also at five per second in this disease. ' Grashey made use of Marey's sphygmograph in the study of the rhythm of oscillation in four cases of paralysis agitans. He made tracings of the tremor of the right and 6 Contributions h r etude et nu diagnostic des formes frustes de la maladie a'e Basedow. 7 Maladies du sytteme nerveux. » Berliner Klin Wochensc/irift, 1883, No. 32. » Archivfur Psychiatrie, Bd. xvi, S. 857, 1885.