The involuntary nervous system / by Walter Holbrook Gaskell.

  • W. H. Gaskell
Date:
1920
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The involuntary nervous system / by Walter Holbrook Gaskell. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    and excitor elements, with their sensory cells and sensory fibres, their intermediary cells and connector fibres and their motor cells and motor fibres ? This book is an attempt to do so, and to put the involuntary nervous system on the same footing as the volun¬ tary system. I propose to trace out the history of this involun¬ tary system and show how our conceptions have been modified from time to time, to give our present knowledge, physiological and anatomical, of the different motor neurons of the system, and to give the evidence upon which it is possible to suggest the reason why the motor neurons of the involuntary tissues of the vertebrate have come to occupy their present position. I will begin with the history of the sympathetic nervous system. The striking point about the sympathetic nerve, which distinguished it from all other nerves in the eyes of anatomists in the early days, was the presence of little knots or ganglia along the whole of its course ; and as these could be traced up to the cranial region they concluded that the sympathetic nerve arose from the cranial region in the neighbourhood of the vagus and passed down to the end of the body. Against this view of the cranial origin of the sympathetic nerve Petit urged that stimulation of the cervical sympathetic caused dilatation of the pupil, and Winslow pointed out that the branches from the superior cervical ganglion towards the cranial nerves diminished in calibre, a fact which was not in accordance with their origin from the cranial nerves. He considered the ganglia to be scattered centres of origin of the sympathetic system and called them the little brains of that system. Haller’s discovery of the existence of communications be¬ tween the ganglia and all the spinal nerves, to which he gave the name “ 7^a7ni co77t7}tU7iicantes'' threw an absolutely new light on the sympathetic system and has been the basis of all subsequent investigations. Of all those in the past whose influence has produced most effect upon our conceptions of the sympathetic system, the name of Bichat comes prominently forward. He taught that two great systems existed in every vertebrate, the one concerned with the outside world, represented by the organs of locomotion and external sense-organs, to which he gave the name animalic ; the other concerned with the regulation of the nutrition of the body, to which he gave the name organic. Each of these systems had
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