On the nervous circle which connects the voluntary muscles with the brain / by Charles Bell.

  • Charles Bell
Date:
1826
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the nervous circle which connects the voluntary muscles with the brain / by Charles Bell. 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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    is further exemplified in the sensibility of the skin to heat; whilst, on the contrary, a muscle touched with a hot or cold sponge during an operation, gives no token of the change of temperature but by the degree of pain. Many of the nerves which perform the most delicate ope- rations in the oeconomy, are not more sensible to pain than the common texture of the frame. The lower degree of sen- sibility to pain possessed by the muscles, and their insensi- bility to heat, is no argument against their having nerves which are alive to the most minute changes of action in their fibres. When the anatomist shall find both the portio dura of the seventh and the fifth going to the integuments of the head and face, he may naturally ask, why are there two nerves to the surface ^ and he will probably reflect, that although the principal office of the nerves of the skin is to convey impres- sion to the sensorium, yet the influence of the mind is con- veyed to the surface. The condition of the mind in passion, for example, is as forcibly communicated to the skin as to the muscles themselves; and therefore if a branch of the fifth be necessary to convey sensation from the surface to the sensorium, the seventh is necessary to the change of vascular action, and to the condition of the pores when affected by a cause proceeding from within, outwards. I feel a hesitation when I reason upon any other ground than on the facts of anatomy. Experiments are more apt to be misinterpreted; and the very circumstance of a motor and
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