(JO FKVKR. 



liftli, can rciulily Ix' nctouutcd fi)r l»y tlic {'xhaustion following tlir iiij)iry, and 

 rsjH-iialh l)V tin- jiroloiif/j'tl deprivation of food. Taking to;i<tlifr all the facts 

 wliicli have breu heretofore brought forward and apparently proven in tliis memoir, 

 I can arrive at no other conclusion than that the rise of bodily temperature, and ol 

 heat pnuluction following separation of the pons from the medulla, is paralytic and 

 due to the removal of some active force. 



Tscheschiii, leil by the rise of the luulily temperature whidi he had noticed after 

 separation of the medulla from the pons, proposed the theory that there is in the 

 bniin, somewhere above the pons, a nerve centre whose function it is directly to 

 inhibit or repress the chemical movements of the body, j. c. the production of animal 

 heat, antl wiiich has be(>n called the inhil)itory heat centre. It must be clearly 

 understood that this tlieory involves the exercise of a controlling influence of the 

 nervous system upon the nutrition of the body. There are physiologists who deny 

 the possibility of such control. It would seem, however, that such denial is opposed 

 to many well established physiological facts. The performance of function is 

 certainly associated with or dependent upon nutritive changes, and production of 

 contraction in a muscular fibre by nerve force must be by the exertion of a direct 

 inriuence upon its nutrition. 



The influence of the nervous system upon disease, i. r. u])on perverted nutrition, 

 a]>pears frerpieutly to be a direct one — the disappearance of warts, the sulisidencc 

 of iurtammation, and the cure of chills, under the spells of the so-called magnetic 

 physicians, as well as the success of tractors and of metallotherapy — all bear 

 witness to the same fact. I have personal knowledge of two cases in which milk 

 secreted in a previously healthy woman directly after a severe fright, produced 

 immediately violent conviilsions in the child, in one case ending almost at once 

 tatally. Every one must have seen violent chorea produced by sudden emotion. 

 Even the grave nutritive disorder chlorosis seems at times to owe its origin to a 

 similar cause. I have seen a case in which a boy violently throwing a ball felt 

 something yield in the arm, the sensation being followed at once by numbness, and 

 in a few hours by a copious eruption of small herpetic vesicles all over the region of 

 the distribution of the median nerve. The curious phenomena of ordinary her{K?« 

 zoster, the trophic changes often associated with neuralgia or paralysis of the fifth 

 pair of nerves, the various peripheral changes following spinal diseases cannot be 

 explained upon the idea of a vaso-motor production. Charcot and his pupils have 

 by their labors shed much liglit upon this sulyect. It is only necessary to mention 

 their observations on infantile palsy, on acute decubitus, on the changes in the joint* 

 in locomotor ataxy, and on amyotrophic paralysis, all of which afford proof of the 

 profound structural alterations which may occur under the influence of spinal disease. 



To examine the clinical and pathological evidence upon this point would carry 

 us too far l»eyond the sultjcct directly in hand to l>e proper to the occasion. It is 

 only necessary to reiterate the fact that various sorts of nutritive changes — changes 

 of kind as well as of degree of growth — are traceable to disease of the nervous 

 syhtem. and to call attention to the very able paper of M. Landouzy, on this sub- 

 ject, in the lirruc Mcn.'ttu.lU <Jc MCdtvinc tt tic Chirurgit, January, ISlb. 



