On the ganglia and nerves of the heart / by Robert Lee.

  • Robert Lee
Date:
1849
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the ganglia and nerves of the heart / by Robert Lee. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    6/22 (page 44)
    in vera et genuina ganglia ; in Equo autem et Bove etiam in iis ramis cardiacorum qui per cordis superficiein reptant nonnulla corpora olivaria gignunt*.” In Tab. VII. fig. 1, he represents, and at p. 42 specifies some of these enlargements; one, e. g. marked 7, as a “ gangliformis intumescentiaa second, marked 30, as “ cardiaci sinistri ganglion insigne.” Scarpa also describes and figures several nerves inde- pendent of, and not accompanying the blood-vessels of the heart, and avails himself of the fact to refute the conclusions to which Behrends had arrived in the Treatise above quoted. The following are the facts relative to the nervous supply of the heart which I believe myself to have established by examination of the foetal heart, of the heart of a child at the age of six years, of the heart of an adult in a sound state, of the human heart hypertrophied, and of the heart of the Ox, and which the preparations are pre- served to demonstrate. The drawing No. 1, entitled “The nerves of the heart of a child nine years of age,” nat. size, represents the preparation displaying the nerves distributed over the exterior of the left ventricle which come olf from the “plexus coronarius posticus” of Scarpa'f', together with a few filaments from the “ plexus coronarius anterior,” Scarpa. It shows the ganglions which Scarpa has delineated below the letters a and b in his Tab. IV., and also the slight enlargement at point of confluence of three or more nerves which Scarpa has likewise figured, as e. g. between the nerves num- bered 58 and 59, and in several other parts of the cardiac nerves displayed in the Tab. IV. above cited. In the place of the long and narrow loop on the nerve which Scarpa figures between the two chief branches of the posterior coronary artery, my preparation shows, as in the drawing herewith sent, a slender fusiform enlargement. The preparation also demonstrates nerves extending beyond the points where they end in Scarpa’s figure, as far as the apex of the heart; and a slight expansion and flattening is presented by some of these apicial filaments of nerves, and nerves not coincident in their course with the arterial branches are also shown in the prepara- tion which have neither been described nor delineated by previous anatomists. In the dissection of the sound heart of the adult, depicted in the drawing No. 2, entitled “The ganglia and nerves at the apex of the left ventricle of the _sound human heart,” the additional nerves at the apex of the left ventricle are more clearly shown, in which three slender fusiform enlargements are shown on nerves accompa- nying the apicial branch of the posterior coronary artery: there is also a well-marked angular enlargement at the point of junction of four nerves near a neighbouring branch of the artery. The preparation which most distinctly establishes the fact of fusiform enlarge- ments of the cardiac nerves, is that represented in the drawing No. 3, entitled “The ganglia and nerves of the left ventricle of a Heifer’s heart and cardiac fasciain * Op. cit. p. 2. f Tabulae Neurologicae, fol. 1794, Tab. IV. Nos. 45, 46, 47, 48, 60 and 61.