Lip chorea and paresis of the external pterygoid muscles : commonly called 'stammering' / by Edward Blake.

  • Blake, Edward T. (Edward Thomas), 1842-1905.
Date:
1890
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Lip chorea and paresis of the external pterygoid muscles : commonly called 'stammering' / by Edward Blake. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    of a neurosis like vocal chorea without first setting O matters right locally. A little thought will convince any man that the matter is an important one. Its magnitude comes home to us when we remember that the portals of the liberal professions are practically closed against the stammerer. Being usually of the neurotic type, the stammerer is more sensitive than other men, often he suffers untold torture from the sense that he is divided like a leper from his fellow men. If we take a male stammerer and seek to detect the cause of his inability to enunciate, we must begin by carefully divesting our minds of every kind of theory respecting the nature of the phenomenon. We then proceed to watch him patiently as, exposed to a good light, he attempts to utter a sentence. We cannot fail to be struck first by the faulty and imperfect way in which the chest is both expanded during inspiration and retracted during expiration. On timing the duration of his longest air-intake, we find that it rarely exceeds five seconds. Com- pare this with the maximum adult male intake lasting sixty seconds, and we can then see how poorly the lungs act, those bellows upon which vocalisation must primarily depend, and how defec- tive must be the oxygenation of this man’s blood.