1870.] On Trophic Nerves. 205 



of these peripheral nervous apparatus has only just established itself 

 as a fact in science,* and so far as the writer is aware, nothing has 

 as yet been attempted as to their pathological history. And weighing 

 hypothesis against hypothesis, the writer still thinks his own, which 

 would explain the facts in question as referable to an impairment of 

 power, to be, at least for the earlier stages of the history, as probable 

 as the counter-hypothesis, which suggests a consentaneous though 

 early alteration of nutrition, as an explanation of the phenomena. 



It may be well to add that the changes in question, or at least 

 some of them, have been observed in non-traumatic cases of nervous 

 disease, such as shingles affecting the arm.f 



The cases which we shall now, in the fourth place, proceed to 

 relate appear to us to show distinctly that nerve-force can act on 

 tissues, and that directly, without, that is to say, any intervention 

 of the blood-vascular system. The first of these is a typically good 

 instance recorded by a typically good observer. In the twentieth 

 volume of the ' Medico-Chirurgical Transactions' (1837) we find 

 the late Sir B. C. Brodie writing as follows : — " A man was admitted 

 into St. George's Hospital in whom there was a forcible separation 

 of the fifth and sixth cervical vertebrae, attended with an effusion of 

 blood within the theca vertebralis, and laceration of the lower part 

 of the cervical portion of the spinal cord. Kespiration was performed 

 by the diaphragm only — of course in a very imperfect manner. 

 The patient died at the end of twenty-two hours ; for some time pre- 

 viously to his death he breathed at long intervals, the pulse being 

 weak and the countenance livid. At length there were not more 

 than five or six respirations in a minute. Nevertheless, when the 

 ball of a thermometer was placed between the scrotum and the thigh, 

 the quicksilver rose to 111° of Fahrenheit's scale. Immediately 

 after death the temperature was examined in the same manner and 

 found to be still the same." 



Now temperature often rises in the presence of great lividity, in 

 the absence, that is, of any but a very imperfect degree of arterializa- 

 tion or oxidation, though not, of course, in the absence of chemical 

 change. Dr. Gray, of this place, informs me, as I write, that in a 

 case of pneumonia, recently under his care, the temperature rose as 

 high as 106° F. But in the case just quoted from Sir B. C. Brodie's 

 memoir no such over-active cell-formation as that which characterizes 

 pneumonia, and indicates its presence by monopolizing the currency 

 of chlorides, can be reasonably supposed to have been present ; and 

 we appear to be shut up to the accepting as an explanation the 

 showering down from the irritated and isolated segments of the spinal 



* See Strieker's ' Handbuch der Lehre von den Geweben,' ii., p. 189, 1869. 

 Dr. Beale, ' Koyal Society's Proceedings,' 1865, p. 249. 



t See Paget, ' Medical Times and Gazette,' 1864, March 26, cit. Handfield 

 Jones, ' St. George's Hospital Keports,' vol. iii., 1868, p. 99. 



