Sleep and sleeplessness / [J. Mortimer Granville].

  • Granville, J. Mortimer (Joseph Mortimer), 1833-1900
Date:
1879
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Sleep and sleeplessness / [J. Mortimer Granville]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    ganglion of the sympathetic system (for example, uneasiness in the “ pit of the stomach,” or aching pain in the lower lumbar region of the spine), are disturbed or disorderly sleepers. Sleep is a nerve state, whether the part sleeping be the brain, or certain parts of that organ, the muscular system, or the viscera. The modi- fications which take place in the vessels supplying the organ or system that sleeps are the effects or consequences instead of the causes of its condition. An organ being at rest the supply of blood is diminished by the nerves regulating the size of its vessels, and when sleep is general and healthy the heart’s action is slower, and the lungs work less rapidly. That these altered conditions are not themselves the causes of sleep must be obvious, from the fact that neither any one of the changes in the circulation which usually accompany sleep, nor all combined, will constantly produce it ; while each or the whole series may be absent, when the condition of sleep is established. This not un- frequently happens in disease. The conditions set up by experimenters who believe they have caused sleep by compressing the veins, and the like, are essentially different from sleep, and so are the states of stupor induced by ingenious methods of tiring out or paralysing, as though by fascination, certain