Nerve-vibration and excitation as agents in the treatment of functional disorder and organic disease.

  • Granville, J. Mortimer (Joseph Mortimer), 1833-1900.
Date:
1883
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Nerve-vibration and excitation as agents in the treatment of functional disorder and organic disease. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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    Percussion as a Therapeutic Agent in Nervous Diseases. With the cognizance of the leading physiologists and neurologists in England and on the Continent, I have for some years past been employing carefully graduated and precisely applied percussion as a thera- peutic agent in the treatment of nervous diseases and disturbances, on a principle of which the following statement, published by me in February, 1881, may be taken as a brief exposition. [I omit passages from The Lancet, sup. cit.] My method is, as will be seen from these extracts, based upon the hypotheses: (1) that all nerve action, whether normal or morbid, is vibratile ; and (2) that it is possible to influence and control abnormal vibrations —in the manner above described—by mechanical vibrations propagated to the nervous structures, in particular directions and at known rates of speed. It is not my present purpose to discuss these hypotheses, or the method in detail; but I am anxious to re-state, and now affirm, certain propositions, founded on expe- rience, which, in previous intimations of the progress and success of my experiments, I submitted tentatively. They are these— 1. I have rarely failed, in a fairly large number of cases, many of them of several years' standing, to bring the cerebro-spinal and—sometimes directly at others in secondary circuits—the sympathetic ganglia, under control, by the application of my percuteur over, or in mechanical relation through the adjacent tissues with, those ganglia.