Puerperal convulsions / by C. A. Lindsley ; read before the New Haven County Medical Society, April, 1858.

  • Lindsley, Charles A. (Charles Augustus), 1826-1906.
Date:
1858
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Puerperal convulsions / by C. A. Lindsley ; read before the New Haven County Medical Society, April, 1858. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    induce convulsion or paralysis according to their severity. Hence it follows that the seat of convulsion of every form must be in the spinal column; which opinion is supported by the experiments of Magendie, Schoeps, Flourens, Hertwig, and others. An interesting experiment performed upon a dog by Dr. Marshall Hall, proved that irritation of the brain produced no effect, while pinching the dura mater lining the cranium, to which are distributed branches of the fifth, excited convulsions ; so that the brain is actually inexcitor of spinal action, while the meninges are strongly excitor. The brain, therefore, has neither nerves of common sensation nor of excito-motion, although it is the sensorium commune. Pathology too gives support to the same idea, for we know that a tumor may exist in the brain without causing any cerebral or spinal symptoms, while a spicula of bone on the interior of the skull may occasion epilepsy. If the tumor does cause convulsion, it is by extension of irritation to the membranes, or by pressure on the medulla oblongata. From such facts as these, and many others, the inference is con- clusive that the nervous system is to be considered both physiologically and pathologically as two essentially distinct and separate organs, named by Dr. Marshall Hall the cerebral system and the excito- motor system. The last, with which we have more particularly to do, comprises the medulla spinalis and oblongata, with the corpora quadrigemina, forming together one distinct organ. Of this, Dr. M. Hall makes the following very comprehensive remark: I believe that the whole order of spasmodic and convulsive diseases belongs to this, the excito-motory division of the nervous system, and that they can not be understood without a previous accurate knowledge of this system. But the authors above quoted agree, so far as they agree at all, in locating the disease in just the other division, the cerebral system, the brain. Forasmuch, however, as neither physiology nor accurate observation in pathology will sustain their theory, we must abandon it, or rather discover, if possible, the true relation of the cerebral symptoms to the disease. If it is the fact, as authors assert, that cerebral congestion is the cause of the attack, at what period of the labor ought we most confi- dently to expect the seizure ? Most assuredly, and for every reason, when the congestion is the greatest,—that is, in the second stage of labor, when the violent contraction of the uterus expels the blood from its parietes into the rest of the system; when the powerful exertion of the voluntary muscles pours out a still larger quantity of blood into