Epilepsy; its symptoms, treatment, and relation to other chronic convulsive diseases / [Sir J. Russell Reynolds].

  • Reynolds, J. Russell (John Russell), Sir, 1828-1896.
Date:
1861
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Epilepsy; its symptoms, treatment, and relation to other chronic convulsive diseases / [Sir J. Russell Reynolds]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    he is to another who has been deprived of sight or speech by a lesion, locally and pathologically very nearly resembling his own. Again, the sufferer from dyspnoea, cough, and expectora- tion,—supposing his maladies, to all his own feelings and aU practical purposes, limited to those three derangements,—is more closely related to another whose distresses are the same, .although from widely different remote causes, than he is to a third person whose complaint is swollen legs and general debility, although these may arise from structural disease very like his own. The right arm may lose its power by injury to the nerves, to the spinal cord, or the brain; by venous or arterial obstruction; by rheumatic, lead, or other poisoning; by acci- dent, or operation; and on the other hand tumour of the brain may cause amaurosis in one, imperfect speech in another, and paralysis of the right arm in a third. So the thoracic symptoms mentioned above may be due to chronic bronchitis, to heart disease, or to morbus Brightii, &c.; and patients suffering from them are more nearly related to the victims of slow phthisis, and of old pleurisy, than they are to others in whom the renal disease or the morbus cordis has produced oedema of the extremities and general weakness. The sufferers from occasional convulsive paroxysms form a natural group,—^limited in similar manner as regards their vital capacity, their social position, their prospects of life, in all its phases, except in that which is the lowest of all, viz., the probable duration of physical existence;—yet the conditions upon which those convulsions remotely depend are as various as are the organs of the body, and the varieties of change which they may undergo. Allowing this, we have the strongest objection that can be iirged against the principle of classification that I propose. Yet this objection is, I think, feeble to the last degree when compared with that which can be raised against adopting either organ or anatomical change as the primary basis of classification. In regard of organ, let it be remembered that, for example, timiour of the brain may induce no sjTnptoms except in the digestive organs ;* that it may produce headache as almost its sole exponent, or blindness, convulsions, hemi- * Abercrombie's Pathological and Practical Researches in Diseases of the Brain and Spinal Cord, p. 472.