On the electrical excitability of the skin / by S. Tschiriew and A. de Watteville.

  • Chiriaev, Sergei Ivanovich, 1850-1919.
Date:
1879
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the electrical excitability of the skin / by S. Tschiriew and A. de Watteville. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    llepriutedfrom ‘Brain/ Part F/.] f ■ ON THE ELECTRICAL EXCITABILITY OF THE SKIN. BY S. TSCHIRIEW, M.D. (ST. PET.), ETC., Wylie Travelling Fellow of the Imperial Academy of Medicine, St. Petersburg, and A. DE WATTEVILLE, M.A. (lOND.), ETC., Assistant Physician to the Hospital for Epilepsy and Paralysis, Regent's Park. The object of the following pages is threefold. First, to indi- cate the conditions which any rational method must fulfil which pretends to give us accurate results as to the electrical excitability of the cutaneous nerves; these conditions will be found to depend partly upon the behaviour of the electrical current, partly upon certain anatomical peculiarities of the skin. Secondly, to criticise in the light of the principles set forth the chief methods hitherto proposed to estimate the electrical sensibility. Third, to propose a new method more simple and rational; and state some of the results already obtained from its application. I. According to the general law of excitation of nerves, formu- lated by Du Bois-Reymond, this excitation depends upon the rapidity with which the electrical density changes in the nerve, and not with the ahsolute vahie of that change. Hence we ought, for measuring the electrical excitability of a nerve, to determine the rapidity of change in the density necessary to excite it; and this is what Dr. v. Fleischl’s ^ ingenious instrument, the Rheonome, enables us to do. Only ‘ “ Untersuchung uber die Gesetze der Nervenerregung,” III. Abkandlung. Stzber. d. k. Academic der Wissensch. zu Wien. Vol. Ixxvi., Part III., p. 138. B