Extract from a lecture on the nervous system, January 1839 / [Marshall Hall].

  • Hall, Marshall, 1790-1857
Date:
[1839]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Extract from a lecture on the nervous system, January 1839 / [Marshall Hall]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    EXTRACT FROM A LECTURE ON THE NERVOUS SYSTEM, BY MARSHALL HALL, M.D. F.R.S. L. & E. ETC. ETC. JANUARY MDCCCXXXIX. # # # * # # * % Let me now call your attention to the true spinal, or excito-motory, system. I shall, in the first instance, confine myself to a detail of experiments ; and I think I may there¬ fore assert that what I shall state may be considered as phy¬ siologically demonstrated. If, the head of an animal being removed, you irritate the spinal marrow, those muscles which receive nerves from below the point so irritated, are excited into a state of con¬ traction. If, instead of irritating the spinal marrow, you irritate a muscular nerve in its course, the muscle or muscles to which this nerve is distributed, are, in like manner, excited into contraction. Haller, who specially treated of this subject, denominated the power in the nervous System, which is thus called into activity, the vis nervosa1; the power of contraction in the muscular fibre, he termed its irritability, or the vis insila. Of the former he observes, “ Irritato nervo, convulsio in musculo oritur, qui ab eo nervo ram os habet. Irritato vero nervo, multis musculis communi, totive artui, omnes ii mus- culi convelluntur, qui ab eo nervo nervos habent, sub sede irritationis ortos. Denique medulla spinali irritata, omnes artus convelluntur, qui infra earn sedem nervos accipiunt; 1 .Some writers having been misled, by this expression, to think there is a simi¬ larity in the views of Prochaska and my own, I must caution you that this vis nervosa of Haller is not the vis nervosa of Prochaska. I can scarcely tell you what the vis nervosa of Prochaska is, unless indeed it he every thing. It is some¬ thing which is augmented in mania and in gout!