Railway accidents or collisions : their effects upon the nervous system : the substance of a paper read before the Harveian Medical Society / by William Camps.

Camps, William.

Date:: 1866

Credit: Railway accidents or collisions : their effects upon the nervous system : the substance of a paper read before the Harveian Medical Society / by William Camps. 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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$the shock, and the violence of a railway collision, which would seem to produce effects upon the nervous system quite beyond those of any ordinary injury. In some cases, we are told, the sufferer may not have sustained any fracture, and the cuts and external injuries may be apparently slight to the visual percep- tion of the medical man ; whilst, notwithstanding this compa- ratively and apparently external trifling injury or injuries, yet there may be coincident with all this, such a shock to the system as for a time to shatter the whole constitution, and this, moreover, to such a degree, to such an extent, that the unfortu- nate sufferer may not altogether recover throughout the re- mainder of liis life, which I apprehend, may, in some instances at least, be reasonably expected to be curtailed in its duration. In an instance on record, the sufferer had been thrown violently against the carriage in which he had been travelling, and was very much shaken, although the only external injury which he appeared to have sustained was a severe bruise over the shoulder. About a month or so, however, after the accident, he began to complain of a sensation of tingling at the Angers, and other symptoms followed which were at once easily recognised and pronounced to denote concussion of the spine. In fact, it is very probably almost impossible, accurately to estimate the amount of injury to health, as well as to life, that may be caused by a severe railway accident or collision. The germs of many a severe disease, hereafter to be developed, may be produced by such a concussion as is caused by a railway collision, and an injury apparently not very severe, may, it is to be feared, not unfrequently be followed by a protracted, if not by a fatal illness ; and a long train of suffering of which we may have but a very imperfect and inadequate conception, may be conveyed in the simple, and unhappily not infrequent announcement of a severe, if not a fatal accident in a railway collision.$