Epilepsy : its symptoms, treatment, and relation to other chronic convulsive diseases / by J. Russell Reynolds.

  • Reynolds J. Russell (John Russell), Sir, 1828-1896.
Date:
1861
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Epilepsy : its symptoms, treatment, and relation to other chronic convulsive diseases / by J. Russell Reynolds. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    PREFACE. Although it has been admitted, from the earliest periods of medical science, that convulsions might arise from different, and indeed opposite conditions of the physical system, it has been customary, and that even in modern times, when convulsions have assumed a particular form, and a chronic history, to denote them by one word—Epilepsy. The increase of exact information has however rendered necessary the qualification of that term; and some not inconsiderable evils have arisen from the modes in which that qualification has been effected. These evils will be at once apparent if we trace the steps by which such terms as renal epilepsy, symptomatic epilepsy, and the like, have crept into daily usage. As soon as pathological investigation had shown that no structural alterations were discoverable in the bodies of some who, during many years of their life-time, had been notoriously epileptic ; and that in others, various lesions were to be foiind in the nervous centres, and in every organ of the body, a division of epilepsy was effected into inorganic or functional, and organic or structural. But such division was soon found inadequate; for the second category contained diseases as widely different from each other as tumour of the brain, and Bright's disease of the kidney, the relation between which lesions and the convulsion required further expression in nosology. The means employed for this purpose have been the words symptomatic