Myelitis of the anterior horns, or, Spinal paralysis of the adult and child / by E. C. Seguin.

  • Seguin, E. C. (Edward Constant), 1843-1898.
Date:
1877
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Myelitis of the anterior horns, or, Spinal paralysis of the adult and child / by E. C. Seguin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    (Dujardin-Beaumetz). Acute spinal paralysis of adults (Petitfils, Eisenlohr, Erb). An affection of adults like infantile spinal paralysis (M. Bernhardt). Poliomyelitis anterior (Kussmaul, Frey). Atrophic paralysis of adults (Leyden). In my paper I used the two denominations, spinal paralysis of the adult, and inflammation of the motor tract of the spinal cord, acute, sub-acute, and chronic. For reasons which will be given when I come to treat of the pathology of the disease, I have now aban- doned the former name as utterly ambiguous and in- definite, and have adopted a synonym of the second de- nomination. I shall speak of the disease, with Du- jardin-Beaumetz, as MYELITIS OF THE ANTERIOR HORNS. Although the term poliomyelitis anterior is one which may always sound pedantic for Anglo-Saxon ears, it should be retained as the Grseco-latin equivalent. Myelitis of the anterior horns may be, as I shall show, acute, sub-acute, and chronic; generalized or dif- fused, and localized ; it may occur at almost any period of life; it may be a primary disease of the spinal cord and be complicated with other lesions, and it may arise secondarily as a complication of pre-existing disease of the spinal cord or brain. It appears to me that the recognition and exact de- termination of this form of myelitis constitute quite as great a progress in pathology as the definition of scle- rosis of the posterior columns (progressive locomotor ataxia). Duchenne^ (de Boulogne) in the last edition of his work on electrization, claims that he recognized the sub- acute form of this affection as early as 1847; and that in 1853 he gave to the profession the first sketch of its * De I'Electrisation localisee, 3me. edition. Paris, 1872, pp. 437, 459-461.