Essays on hysteria, brain-tumor, and some other cases of nervous disease.

  • Jacobi, Mary Putnam, 1842-1906.
Date:
1888
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Essays on hysteria, brain-tumor, and some other cases of nervous disease. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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    Case XXXI.—Well-developed young woman, aged twenty-five. No appearance of anaemia, but to haemitametre blood-corpuscles always below four million ; hsemoglobine, sixty per cent. Men- struation always irregular, often at intervals of six months, finally of an entire year. During seven years almost constant suffering from headaches of all description. For a year, ovarian hyperaes- thesia, aggravated by walking. Numbness and inability to use arms. Often inability to use eyes in reading, etc.,,for several weeks at a time, though eyes quite free from organic defect. In- ability for mental exertion ; frequent attacks of mental depres- sion. Finally return of menstruation—four times in eight months —under combined influence of change of scene and society and use of health-lift. Coincidently headache, much relieved, began to disappear during long intervals ; all other symptoms entirely disappeared. Spasmodic tonus or contraction of the unstriped muscular fibre of the blood-vessels, has its counterpart in the spasm of other unstriped muscular fibre, which is so common in hysterics. There is the spasm of the oesophagus (globus), of the intestine (cramps), of the uterus (dysmenorrhcea). There is, apart from spasm, the irregular and precipitate peristaltic contractions of the stomach, which result in vomiting ; of the intestine, which result in the well-known nervous diarrhoea. It is generally accepted that both the tetanic spasm and the irregular clonic contractions of unstriped muscular fibre imply an excess of nerve-discharges through the sympathetic nerve, when this ceases to be sufficiently inhibited by the cerebro-spinal axis. The splanchnic habitually inhibits the intestine ; its paralysis is fol- lowed both by exaggerated peristalsis and neuro- paralytic hyperemia.1 The facility with which diarrhoea follows, in certain persons, upon depressing emotions, indicates that the inhibition of cerebral activities suffices to remove this 1 Nothnagel : Studien tiber den Darm.