Nerve-vibration and excitation as agents in the treatment of functional disorder and organic disease / by J. Mortimer Granville.

Date:
1883
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Nerve-vibration and excitation as agents in the treatment of functional disorder and organic disease / by J. Mortimer Granville. 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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    1. When nervous tissue acts, its essential elements— viz., cells and fibres—vibrate. It follows that by throwing these elements into vibration by mechanical movement, we establish a condition favourable to the discharge of nervous force from the centres affected, and at the same time stimulate the nerve centre, when discharged, to develop new force to compensate the loss of energy expended in exercise. 2. The vibration of nervous elements being a purely mechanical process, it must be conformable to the laws or conditions that govern the vibratile movement of other bodies, whether organic or inorganic—for example, reed instruments—and the vibration of cells and fibres should, therefore, be amenable to the laws of concord and discord. In short, what Newton discovered and taught in explica- tion of the phenomena of light and sound, with the recog- nized correlations of the diatonic and chromatic scales, must be equally applicable to an as yet unrecognized but doubtless existing scale of nerve-vibrations. And such affinity must exist between the nature of the faculty, and the working of the organic apparatus, of per- ception, in regard to sound, colour, and other forms or properties of the external, and other physical processes whereby these forms or properties of matter are pro- duced, that the nervous system and the external world are not simply en rapport, but physically correlated. It is, therefore, only reasonable to suppose that the evolution of nervous force is governed by the same laws that govern the evolution (or production) of light, colour, sound, odour, and other qualities or properties of matter which are in many instances demonstrably, and