A manual of clinical medicine and physical diagnosis / by Thomas Hawkes Tanner.

  • Tanner, Thomas Hawkes, 1824-1871.
Date:
1876
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A manual of clinical medicine and physical diagnosis / by Thomas Hawkes Tanner. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    points, sucli as those of the compass, are recognisable at certain distances the one from the other, which experience has taught ns are standards for different parts of the body. In anaesthesia these points cannot be distinguished at all, or in the incomplete forms of anaesthesia, only at greater distances than is usual in health. We now come to alterations of muscular action, and foremost amongst the deviations from health is the con- dition termed— Paralysis.—Disease of the brain or spinal cord in- volving extremities of certain nerves there originating will necessarily be followed by effects in the structures to which such nerves are distributed, and of which indeed they form an integral and necessary part. The result of such disease is paralysis or palsy, by which is meant a local or partial loss of sensibility, or of motion, or of both in one or more parts of the body; and as the nerves con- tain motor and sensory fibres, the sensation and the mo- tion of the part affected will be altered probably together. All paralytic affections may be divided into two classes— the first including those in which both motion and sensi- bility are affected ; the second, those in which the one or the other only is lost or diminished. The former is called perfect, the latter imperfect paralysis. Imperfect paralysis is divided into acinesia—paralysis of motion; and anaesthesia—paralysis of sensibility. Again, the pa- ralysis may be general or partial, as it affects the whole body or only a portion of it. General paralysis, or com- plete loss of sensation and motion of the whole system, cannot take place without death immediately resulting. But this expression is usually applied to palsy affecting the four extremities, whether any of the other parts of the body are implicated or not. Partial paralysis is di- vided into hemiplegia when it is limited to the lateral half, and paraplegia when it is confined to the inferior half of the body. The term local paralysis is used when only a small portion of the body is affected, as the face, a limb, a foot, &c. The term reflex paralysis is now used to indi- cate that variety of paralysis which is dependent upon disease in some part—urinary, uterine, or intestinal—not directly connected with the paralysed part itself. It is induced through the reflex agency of the spinal cord. Paralysis may be hysterical. Paralysis of the eye, or loss of sensibility of the retina to the rays of light, is called amaurosis; paralysis of the