Neuralgia and the diseases that resemble it / by Francis E. Anstie.

  • Anstie, Francis Edmund, 1833-1874.
Date:
1871
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Neuralgia and the diseases that resemble it / by Francis E. Anstie. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    delayed to an advanced period of life^ oeeurring altogether pre- maturely, and bringing with them a kind of neuralgic pain which is far more common in the decline than in the morning of life. It will be seen presently that functional derangements may be in like manner precociously induced, with the parallel effect of inducing such pains as are ordinarily the product of a later epoch. From the moment that puberty arrives all is changed in the status of the nervous system. In the stir and tumult which pervade the organism, and especially in the enormous diversion of its nutritive and formative energy to the evolution of the generative organs and the correlative sexual instincts^ the delicate apparatus of the nervous system is apt to be over- whelmed, or left behind, in the race of development. Under these cii'cumstances, the tendency to neuralgic affections rapidly increases. It wdll, however, be seen later that there is a great preponderance of particular varieties of the disease during this time. This period is above all things fruitful in trigeminal neuralgias, especially migraine. There remains to be noticed the fact that sexual precocity sometimes very much anticipates the peculiar characteristics of the period after puberty. It is well known that in too many instances children are led by the almost irresistible influence of bad example, to indulge in thoughts and practices which are thoroughly unchildish, and which exercise a powerfully disturbing influence upon the nervous system. A child before the age of puberty ought to be distinguished (if moderately healthy in other respects) by the absence of any tendency to dwell upon his own bodily health. Under the influence of precocious sexual irritation he becomes hypochondriacal and self-centred, and often suffers, not merely from fanciful fears and fanciful pains, but from actual neuralgia, which is some- times severe. The attacks of migraine, which are a frequent affection of delicate children whose puberty occurs at the normal time, are a much earlier torment with children who have early become addicted to bad practices. It is an anticipatory effect upon the constitution, strictly analogous to the production of the so-called ' hysteria' in little girls under similar circum- stances ; and I suppose there is no physician who has not once