A treatise on headache and neuralgia : including spinal irritation and a disquisition on normal and morbid sleep / by J. Leonard Corning ; with an appendix, Eye strain, a cause of headache, by David Webster.

  • Corning, J. Leonard (James Leonard), 1855-1923.
Date:
1890 [©1888]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A treatise on headache and neuralgia : including spinal irritation and a disquisition on normal and morbid sleep / by J. Leonard Corning ; with an appendix, Eye strain, a cause of headache, by David Webster. 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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    of the other nerves, destined for intra-cranial purposes, are derived from the sympathetic. '' These, then, are the nerves which are of chief inter- est to our present inquiry. Nerves of this class accom- pany blood-vessels, and when we observe the large amount of these vessels, the brain and its membranes being more liberally supplied with blood than any other organ (the quantity being computed as one-fifth of the blood of the whole body), we might, without searching further, feel convinced that there must be a corresponding supply of ganglionic nerves; but the minute examination of modern anatomists has tracked them in great abundance. Dismissing the same point, Niemeyer1 observes that: Headache, a very frequent symptom in all cerebral diseases, is very difficult to explain; we do not even know if it is of central origin (that is, if it originates in the parts of the brain where irritation causes symptoms of pain after the insensible greater hemispheres have been removed), or whether, as I think is more probable, it depends on irritation of the filaments of the trigeminus going to the dura mater. The great sensitiveness to impressions on the senses depends on the increase of excitability, caused by the cerebral hypersemia, or the hypersesthesia of those portions of the brain through which peripheral irrita- tions are perceived. The patients do not exactly feel, see, and hear more sharply than ordinarily, but they are annoyed by irritations far weaker than such as usually annoy them. Light troubles them; a slight sound or an insignificant irritation of the nerves of touch excites disagreeable feelings. Morbid excitation (which must not be identified with increased excitabil- 1 Niemeyer's Practical Medicine, Vol. II., p. 159, quoted by Day. %