Volume 1

Injuries of the spine and spinal cord without apparent mechanical lesion, and nervous shock : in their surgical and medico-legal aspects / by Herbert W. Page.

Date:
1883
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Injuries of the spine and spinal cord without apparent mechanical lesion, and nervous shock : in their surgical and medico-legal aspects / by Herbert W. Page. 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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    INJURIES OF THE SPINE AND SPINAL CORD CHAPTER I CONCUSSION OF THE SPINAL COliD I The structural integrity of the central nervous system is of supreme importance in the animal economy ; and it may with truth be said that of all the accidents to which man is liable, none more serious can befall him than injury to the spinal cord. There is, indeed, no organ in the human body whose structural damage is fraught with such grave results ; for whether we regard it as the conductor of impressions to and from the brain, as the co-ordinating centre of orderly automatic movements, or as the controlling guardian of healthy nutrition and change, the integrity of this part of the cerebro-spinal axis is essential for the due performance of its varied functions. Were the spinal cord a shapeless mass like the liver or the spleen, it is conceivable that severe damage might be done to it without interference with its peculiar functions ; but, being as it is a slender cord, injury, like the broken link in a chain, renders its function inert, revealing how the integrity of the whole depends upon the integrity of a part. To have the use of the limbs impaired, or altogether lost; to have them cut off, as it were, from the sentient life of the organism,