Fatigue / by A. Mosso ; translated by Margaret Drummond and W.B. Drummond.

  • Mosso, A. (Angelo), 1846-1910. Fatica. English
Date:
1915
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Fatigue / by A. Mosso ; translated by Margaret Drummond and W.B. Drummond. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    120/360 (page 100)
    in the original works ; I shall only state that the duration of the stimulus and the number and fre- quency of the electric shocks imitated as nearly as possible the instigation of the will. The flexion of the middle finger raised a weight of one kilo- gramme. The surprising feature is the regularity of this curve, which demonstrates that the energy of the muscle is exhausted by definite degrees when it does work without the participation of the will.1 Instead of stimulating the muscle directly we may excite the nerve. In this case, we apply the electrodes a little below the arm-pit, at the inner border of the biceps muscle, where in some people the nerve can be felt through the skin near the brachial artery. Such experiments are very im- portant to us physiologists, because they allow us to see what takes place in the muscles when they work under the influence of a stimulus applied to the nerve, and become fatigued without participation of the brain in the work, as was the case in Fig. 13. We thus- exclude the mental factor, and yet the curve maintains a certain resemblance to the volun- tary curve. The correspondence cannot be com- plete, because the weights which the muscle lifted in these experiments were smaller. I have already said that, in Tracing 12, the muscle raised a 1 [Speaking of involuntary fatigue in Arch. ital. de Biol., voi. xiii, 1890, p. 139, Professor Mosso states that in some cases he found the summits of the contractions to form a straight line (as Kronecker did in the case of frogs), but that in most cases they formed either a convex or a concave curve. The curve, in short, varied with the person experimented upon.—Tr.]