Handbook of insanity for practitioners and students / by Theodore Kirchhoff.

  • Kirchhoff, Theodor, 1853-1922.
Date:
1895
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Handbook of insanity for practitioners and students / by Theodore Kirchhoff. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    pecially marked. Perhaps we must attribute to sucli anaesthesias the complaints of emptiness, pressure, band- like compression of the head, drying of the brain, air and water in the brain, etc. When the disease extends to the spinal cord, the parts supplied by the latter become in- volved. Anaesthesias of the muscles produce numerous symptoms. It must always be remembered, however, that psychical insensibility due to diminished attention suffices to explain such anaesthesia. Even the healthy individual will forget pain as the result of anger or excitement. Hvperaesthesias or purely quantitative intensification of normal sensibility are not frequent in psychoses. But if the term is meant to include qualitative changes arising from the combination with psychical elements and alter- nation with anaesthesias, it is very frequent. The attempt to distinguish a peripheral and central origin is not very feasible, because cutaneous and muscular sensibility are chiefly involved and, as in the case of hallucinations, these are analyzed with difficulty. But experience shows that, in not a few cases, circumscribed hyperaesthesia of the skin or mucous membranes may be the cause of some special symptom in insanity. The integument is then rubbed to the raw by the patient. Similar symptoms also depend upon diseases of the cord, especially those associ- ated with the sexual apparatus. It is, however, impossi- ble to determine to what extent peripheral and central elements are mingled in the feelings of distressing mus- cular restlessness, pains in the heart, and similar condi- tions. In hypochondria, in particular, the symptomatology is composed of a mixture of peripheral and central liypenes- thesias. In this disease one form is often converted into the other. An originally peripheral hyperesthesia, gives rise to psychical hyperesthesia, and this gradually becomes independent. This is shown most distinctly in neuralgias associated with menstruation, because the renewed peri- pheral irritation increases the psychical irritability already present, and sometimes produces a periodical recurrence of secondary delusions.