126 Analyses of a Series of Papers, by Mr. C. Bell, 



several parts are necessarily influenced in excited respiration, 

 as well as in the acts of smelling, coughing, sneezing, and 

 speaking: for these, the co-operation of the whole extended 

 class of respiratory nerves is required. 



Of Pathology, as illustrated by a Knowledge of the respiratory 

 System of Nerves. 



From all that has been said, it may be seen of what import- 

 ance this system is to the continuance of life. The infant 

 born without a brain can breathe if the origins of these nerves 

 be entire. Wounds in the spine below these origins are not 

 immediately fatal ; but when inflicted on the part of the me- 

 dulla oblongata giving origin to them, they cause instant death 

 by suppressing at once the act of respiration in the nostrils, 

 throat and wind-pipe, and the action of the muscles both with- 

 out and within the chest. A young man was taken to the 

 Middlesex Hospital, who had fallen upon his head. He soon 

 recovered, and lay for some time in the hospital without ex- 

 hibiting a symptom to raise alarm. He had given thanks to 

 the assembled governors of the hospital ; and when he re- 

 turned to his ward to bid adieu to the other patients, he fell, 

 and in the instant expired. It was found, on examination of 

 his head, that the margins of the occipital hole had been 

 broken ; so that on turning his head the pieces were displaced, 

 and closed and crushed the medulla oblongata as it passes from 

 the skull. 



A man was trundling a wheel-barrow in the street, and 

 wishing to turn off the carriage way on to the flag-stones, he 

 met with that resistance which obliged him to make several 

 efforts to overcome it ; at length drawing back the wheel-bar- 

 row he made a push, and succeeded : but the wheel running 

 forwards, he fell, and remained motionless, and was found to 

 be quite dead. The tooth-like process of the 2d vertebra of 

 the neck had burst from the transverse ligament of the first. 

 The impulse given to the head had done this violence, and 

 had at the same time carried forward the spinal marrow against 

 the process, on which it was crushed. 



Disease influences these nerves differently from the other 

 division of the nervous system. Their functions are left en- 

 tire when the voluntary nerves have ceased to act, and they 

 are sometimes strangely disordered, while the mind is entire in 

 all its offices, and the voluntary operations perfect. In tetanus 

 the latter are affected, and locked up in convulsions ; in hy- 

 drophobia the former ; hence the convulsions of the throat, 

 the paroxysms of suffocation, the speechless agony, and the 

 excess of expression in the whole frame, while the voluntary 



motions 



