On a new method of treating neuralgia by the direct application of opiates to the painful points / by Alexander Wood.

Date:
1855
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On a new method of treating neuralgia by the direct application of opiates to the painful points / by Alexander Wood. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    NEW METHOD OF TREATING NEURALGIA. The class of diseases to which this new treatment is ap- plicable are variously designated. Under the names of Neu- ralgia, tic douloureux, sciatica, hemicrania, are comprehended a variety of affections, possessing in common but the one symptom of a pain more or less violent, situated in the course of a nerve. The attack may be sudden and violent, or gradual, in- creasing in intensity as it proceeds, tbe paroxysms may occur at regular intervals, or appear only at uncertain periods. In many cases they occur in individuals of a feeble habit of body, who have never been strong, or who have had their ori- ginal strength impaired by care, mental anxiety, or profuse and weakening discharges. In other cases, again, they occur in the plethoric and robust. To test the value of the proposed method of cure, its application must be limited to real neu- ralgic affections, where the painis actually seated in the course of the nerve. But we must go a step farther and endeavour to ascertain whether the disease is central or centripetal;— in other words, whether the morbid process on which it de- pends be seated in the brain, the grand centre of nervous in- fluence, or in one of the conducting trunks by which irrita- tions affecting the ultimate distribution of the nervous fibrils are conveyed to that central organ. The essential chai’acter of all these diseases is exalted irri- tability, and increased irritation of the nerves of sensation. When the irritation is increased, a paroxysm of suffering ensues ; but even in the absence of the paroxysm the irrita- bility induces locally a morbid sensibility and tenderness of the affected nerve, and generally an unusual sensitiveness to atmospheric and other influences. It is evident that although these affections sufficiently re- semble one another to admit of their being conveniently grouped together as one family, yet, depending, as they do, on so many and such dissimilar causes, and arising, as they