Experimental rescearches on the post-mortem contractility of the muscles, with observations on the reflex theory / by Bennet Dowler.

  • Dowler, Bennet, 1797-1879.
Date:
1846
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Experimental rescearches on the post-mortem contractility of the muscles, with observations on the reflex theory / by Bennet Dowler. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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

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    trine de Charles Bell, etc.), he was gravely charged with being the only member of that learned institution who denied this fundamental doctrine of neurology. Impartial history teaches us not to be surprised at any- thing which relates to the oscillations of medical theory. Dr. Marshall Hall, who has lately received the well-merited honor of membership in the Academy, is more fortunate than Bell, since he sees his reflex doc- trine flourishing almost everywhere in insular and continental Europe. However desirable it may be to avoid uttering common-place homilies on the nervous system, it is necessary to give, briefly as perspicuity will allow, the views of the most prominent writers on the subject under con- sideration. The reflex school maintains, not only that the integrity of the spinal cord is indispensalde to transmission, but that the division of the anterior roots is a complete barrier to muscular motion. This doctrine is not based on the healthy, living body. It is not, with a few obscure and unimportant exceptions, deduced from morbid conditions, but from the last agony, and more than all, from the recently dead state of the inferior animals—a kind of proof by no means satisfactory. It should never be forgotten that experiments on the inferior animals, as frogs and turtles, are inconclusive in establishing the com- plicated physiology of man. An earth-worm may be cut into several pieces, each of which becomes a perfect animal. The more the hydrce are subdivided, the more is their number increased without loss of vitality. Could we deduce a vital or reflex theory from such experiments applicable to man ? Were capital punishment changed from hanging to vivisection of the spinal marrow, this would but poorly illustrate the physiology of a healthy man, or the pathology of a sick one, yet one such experiment would be worth a thousand upon frogs. I beg leave to offer an example, not perhaps the most striking, but the most convenient, taken from “ Blackwood’s Magazine,” showing the vital- ity of the shark (reported in a work “ Fifty days on hoard a slave vessel, in 1843,” by the Rev. P. G. Grenfell, chaplain on board H.B.M. ship Cleopatra) :— “ A shark followed the ship and was caught. When brought on deck he exhi- bited the usual and remarkable tenacity of life. Though the tail was chopped off and his entrails taken out, in neither of which operations it exhibited any signs of sensation, yet no sooner was a bucket of salt water poured on it to wash the deck, than it beiran to flounder about and bile on all sides.” Does man ever exhibit such vivid phenomena after evisceration 1 est obscuritC tout est confusion ; avec lui, tout se denoue, tout s^explique, et Its tinehres font place a, la lumiere’' M. Castel delivers himself of his general doc- trine thus, “ La myotilite exige un plus grand soinme de puissance nerveuse que la sensibility. He maintains that the only difference between the anterior and pos- terior roots consists in the different degrees of consistence or density by which their conducting power is modified ; that the anterior roots have more motor force, because they are denser, and, therefore, better galvanic conductors. Now without affirming or denying M. Castel’s doctrine, I must protest against the principle of building one half physiology and pathology upon the conducting powers of zinc, cop- per, nerves and muscles. This superior conduction of the anterior roots may refute the doctrine of Bell, but still it leaves us in that terra incognita (or terra nervosa, it might be called), where Bell struggled all his life along the frontiers of galvanism and vitalism—where reason as well as electricity itself, cast an uncertain and bewil- dering light, and where an invisible barrier arrests the progress of the human facul- ties. Jn this nebulous realm, this Hades of physiology, the reflex magicians build their phantasmagorial system.