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

  • Jacobi, Mary Putnam, 1842-1906.
Date:
1888
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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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    inhibitory influence of the splanchnic.1 Per contra, it may be inferred that the splanchnic nerve habitually serves to convey inhibitory influences from the brain. The constipation of hysterics, which is often so re- markably obstinate, could not, consistently with the theory advanced in this paper, be ascribed to an excess of cerebral inhibition such as causes the constipation of organic brain disease. It is more probably associ- ated with deficient secretion on the intestinal mucosa, through deranged vaso-motor innervation. In severe hysteric attacks the stools, when procured, are apt to be singularly hard, dry, and black. Tetanic cramp, associated with flatulence, interferes with peristalsis. Spasm of accommodation of the eye and spasmodic action of the muscles of the larynx are phenomena which seem to be intermediate between the disorders of other voluntary and of involuntary muscular fibre. Hysteric aphonia certainly ranks among the hys- teric paralyses, and is, in every respect, analogous to those of the limbs. If, as assumed by Delavan,2 the cortical centre for the inferior laryngeal nerve be near the centres for articulation, it cannot be identified with them. Paralysis of the vocal cords only by exception accompanies aphasia3; and sounds, whose varying timbre would imply varying modulated contraction of the laryngeal muscles, can still be emitted when power of distinct articulation is lost. Conversely, in hyster- 1 Nothnagel (loc. cit.) comments on the singularity of the circumstance that the large intestine is normally evacuated only once a day. The fact that the typical time for this evacuation is the early morning may indicate that during sleep, when cortical inhibition is reduced to a minimum, the irritability of the intestinal nerves gradually rises until, upon the stimulus of the first meal, peri- staltic contractions attain their maximum of power. 2 On the Cortical Motor Centre for the Larynx, The New York Medical Record, 1885. 3 It did in Delavan's cases.