ON NEURAL EXCRETION 



75 



systemic nervous system, such, for instance, as heart com- 

 plications in rheumatic fever, and pneumonia in influenza, 

 where the specific neural virus travels along the pneumo- 

 gastric nerve trunks into the . parenchyma and proper 

 structural elements of lungs and heart respectively, after 

 incubation, in the lymph spaces of the cerebro-spinal 

 cavity. Other viscera, innervated by the solar plexus, 

 coeliac axis, and other sympathetic ganglia, conform to the 

 same laws in relation to the incidence of those diseases 

 which spread to them from the systemic nervous system, 

 and serve as channels through which morbid or toxic 

 agencies find an exit from the sympathetic system, on the 

 same principle which characterises the excretion of an 

 exanthematous virus or chemical poison from the cutaneous 

 surface of the body. 



From all which we may infer that these varieties of 

 disease processes and phenomena associated with neural 

 excretion are the active curative agencies or means exer- 

 cised by the vis medicatrix nature for the maintenance of 

 the health of its subjects, and that, generally speaking, all 

 that science and art are called upon to do is to " put no 

 obstacles in the way," and, if possible, to "lend a helping 

 hand" in the work which the natural history of the 

 particular disease in question usually more or less clearly 

 indicates. 



Before departing from the subjects of neural terminal 

 distribution and excretion as the determining factors in 

 fashioning the character and pattern of skin eruption, and 

 affecting the incidence of diseases belonging to the sensory, 

 motor, and sympathetic terminal nerve distributions, we 

 would call attention to the possible, and, we think, 

 probable, occurrence of an order of diseases, due not to 

 the action of neural material poisons on the structures to 

 which the nerve terminal fibres are conveyed, but to the 

 modifying and, it may be, destroying influence of intensi- 

 fied, perverted, or alien nerve energy finding an exit 

 through these terminal nervatures into the histologically 

 related, if not continuous, non-nervous or sympathetically 

 innervated textures. The leakage of nerve energy in 

 small or large amounts into or out of sensory and motor 

 and sympathetico-systemic nerve terminals is an occur- 



