Читать книгу On the Curability of Certain Forms of Insanity, Epilepsy, Catalepsy, and Hysteria in Females онлайн

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In Dr. Handfield Jones’s Lumleian Lectures, delivered last year before the College of Physicians, he thus sums up his views on this subject:—“The essential idea of the inhibitory theory is, that an impression conveyed to a nervous centre by afferent nerves may weaken or paralyze, instead of exciting, its action, either from the congenital or acquired debility and sensitiveness of the nerve itself, or because the impression is unduly intense or absolutely injurious. Both these things have in every case to be considered—viz., the state of the nerve force, and the kind and amount of impression, as the resulting phenomena will vary with the variation of either.”

Dr. Jones next takes it as a matter of certainty, “that a nervous centre may be more or less completely paralyzed without having undergone organic change, in consequence of some enfeebling morbid influence;” and quotes from Dr. Gull^[2] “a most interesting instance of complete paraplegia induced by sexual excess, in which nothing abnormal could be detected in the cord, even by careful microscopy. This was paralysis from simple exhaustion.”