The sympathetic nervous sytem in disease / by W. Langdon Brown.

  • Langdon-Brown, W. (Walter), 1870-1946.
Date:
1920
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The sympathetic nervous sytem in disease / by W. Langdon Brown. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    30/184 (page 14)
    In pain, fear, rage and any intense excitement the sympathetic neurons are brought rapidly into play, and the action of the cranial division of the para-sympathetic is inhibited. In other words, the anabolic activities of the body are in abeyance, and the katabolic activities go on unchecked. Potential energy is converted into kinetic, and reserves are freely spent. This is comprehensible now that we see these katabolic activities are defensive in origin and aided the primitive animal in its struggle with its antagonist : and that complex organism the State, when at war, like the individuals of which it is composed, inhibits its anabolic activities, spends its reserves, and brings into play every katabolic activity which can aid it in its struggle for victory. The Receptor Channels of the Sympathetic Nervous System Although the bulbar and sacral autonomic nerve trunks apparently send afferent fibres to all the organs to which they send efferent fibres, this is not the case with the sympathetic, which sends none to the body walls or limbs, nor to the head where it overlaps the bulbar autonomic. It sends relatively few to the region where it overlaps the sacral autonomic. In the thoracic and abdominal viscera most of the afferent fibres, which on electrical stimulation give rise to pain, pass by the sympathetic and not by the vagus. Afferent fibres can be traced from the sympathetic to the Pacinian corpuscles in the cat’s mesentery (see fig. 5, p. 8). They come from the same spinal nerves as the efferent fibres, but there is no evidence of their being subdivided into pre- and post-ganglionic portions. There is no satisfactory evidence of the existence of non- medullated afferent fibres, and the medullated ones are large, not small like the efferent fibres (see fig. 8). They appear to have their trophic centres in the posterior