Ophthalmology and diseases of the nervous system, being : the Bowman Lecture, delivered Friday, November 13th, 1885 / by J.Hughlings Jackson.

  • Jackson, J. Hughlings (John Hughlings), 1835-1911.
Date:
[1885?]
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Ophthalmology and diseases of the nervous system, being : the Bowman Lecture, delivered Friday, November 13th, 1885 / by J.Hughlings Jackson. 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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    charging lesion ” is in a different part of the highest centres in the two cases. There are many epilepsies, and many insanities. 13ut now I give en bloc the symptoms of many severe epileptic fits, of many slight fits, and the symptoms of epileptic fits (or, I should say, epileptiform seizures), artificially produced in dogs ; all are, at any rate, symptoms produced by cortical discharges (liberations of energy). Among them are very important eye-symptoms. At the climax of a severe fit we see the algebraical sums of the co-operations and antagonisms of strongly developed movements of all the muscles of animal life accessible to observation; universal convulsion. As to wide involvement of sensory elements in the epileptic dis- charge, we can say that this is implied by “ warnings ” of crude and excessive smells, colours, sounds, tastes, by tinglings, &c., of the hands, and by many crude and excessive organic sensations; of what happens in the sensory sphere after loss of consciousness we can say nothing. Besides colour development, there is another eye-symptom, a vertigo, in which external objects seem to move, implying discharge, direct or indirect, of motor cerebral elements representing ocular movements. We find dilatation of the pupils (perhaps, sometimes, there is contraction), there are great pallor of the face, increased flow of saliva, perspiration, alterations of pulse and respi- ration, passage of urine and faeces, and erection of the penis. Vulpian curarised a dog, thus putting the muscles of animal life out of the reach of an artificially induced discharge of the dog’s left sigmoid gyrus (artificial respi- ration was kept up). Speaking almost only of effects of cortical discharges, which I have not yet mentioned, there were slowing and irregularity of the heart, raised arterial pi’essure, increased flow of bile, a little paling of the kidneys and diminution of their secretion, contraction of the bladder, and contraction of the spleen. So we go a long way towards showing that the epileptic paroxysm has a universal symptomatology, having shown that sensations are referred to many different parts of the