This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1867 edition. Excerpt: ... muscular coat of the great organ of digestion, and of the smaller bowels. Anaemia and other debilitating causes are alleged to predispose to hysteria; all sexual irregularities excite it. N 0 known alteration in the brain or spinal cord belongs to its history. Yet its frequently repeated occurrence ...
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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1867 edition. Excerpt: ... muscular coat of the great organ of digestion, and of the smaller bowels. Anaemia and other debilitating causes are alleged to predispose to hysteria; all sexual irregularities excite it. N 0 known alteration in the brain or spinal cord belongs to its history. Yet its frequently repeated occurrence always presents a degree of danger of the supervention of insanity, imbecility, or epilepsy. From the latter it is strongly contradistinguished in typical cases by its marked hyperaesthesia; while epileptics are unconscious from the invasion, in hysteria the perceptive powers are never abolished, even during violent attacks; stimulants and irritants continue to make their impression on the sensitive nerves; the patient in the fit still starts when a loud noise is made, usually hears voices about her, and shrinks from light. It is not an easy matter to fix the pathological place of catalepsy. It is not properly either a convulsion or a spasm--the muscles seem simply rigid, yet they do not strongly resist efforts upon them to make either flexion or extension. Its alliances with other nervous affections are uncertain and obscure; closer, I think, with hysteria than any other; I once saw it associated apparently with epilepsy. Handfield Jones calls it "a disorder intermediate between epilepsy and tetanus, with both which it has afiinities. It resembles much (he says) the variety of epilepsy termed tetanic." But in tetanus the muscular contraction--a true spasm--is extremely painful. All cramp, the same author tells us, even the cramp of the swimmer, brought on by exertion or cold, is a small tetanus. We know that all cramps are painful. The rigidity of catalepsy is not painful, the consciousness not being always impaired. In cases...
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