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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    a condition of profound mental and physical prostra- tion by the death of her mother. This condition was complicated by insomnia, and attended by a degree of psychic pain which the patient subsequently described as the tortures of hell. At the end of two months the symptoms were unabated, and the attending phy- sician began to suspect organic disease of the spinal cord. The patient was then sent to another city, and immediately began to improve. Without further treatment than a daily seance of faradization, which cured the insomnia, she rapidly recovered. When change of occupation and change of interest can be added to change of scene the influence is still greater. The more areas of the cortex that can be awakened to functional activity, the more chance there is for resisting sensory inhibition ; the more vaso- motor inhibiting power is restored to the cortex, the more the intracerebral circulation of impressions is quickened, centrifugal currents established, and, if we may hazard again the hypothesis already enunciated, the more the surcharged sensory centres may be dis- charged. The foregoing influences all bear upon the mental processes of the brain, finally elaborated (it is prob- able) in its latent zones. By affecting these, vis- ceral disorders are frequently relieved, not because they did not exist before, but because the visceral func- tions of the brain in controlling vase-motor spasm have been indirectly modified, and the disorders resulting from vaso-motor excitation are therefore controlled. After the psychic, the second great function of the brain which sustains inhibition in hysteria is the motor. Treatment directed to the stimulation of this function may be expected to be beneficial in the same way, and