On some forms of paralysis from peripheral neuritis : of gouty, alcoholic, diphtheritic, and other origin / by Thomas Buzzard.

Date:
1886
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On some forms of paralysis from peripheral neuritis : of gouty, alcoholic, diphtheritic, and other origin / by Thomas Buzzard. 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.

    40/164 (page 28)
    put out. Her urine was described as being thick. Exami- nation with induced electrical currents showed that the intrinsic muscles of the left thumb were less excitable than those of the right, and, to a marked degree, less excitable than the corresponding muscles of a healthy sub- ject. Inquiry into the history elicited that the patient’s father had suffered badly from gout, and that she herself drank a great deal of sherry and occasionally also whisky. A tradesman, aged forty-seven, complained that the thumb and first two fingers of the left hand had lost grasp- ing power. The skin covering them was more sensitive than on the right side. He could not flex the phalanges of the thumb, but could adduct the member; nor could he flex any of the phalanges of the index and middle fingers except the first. His forearm had become thinner ; at its upper part it measured 8|in. as against 9f in., the measure- ment of the right forearm at the same point. The patient had suffered for upwards of three weeks. Thei’e had been no pain in the arm, but a numbness and dead feeling over the inside half of it. The fingers, however, were always in a state of painful “ pins and needles,” a feeling, as the patient himself described it, “ exactly like that which occurs after pulling ice about for some time, and then putting the bauds near the fire.” At the parts of the hand and arm affected by this active numbness there was exaggeration of all forms of sensibility—that of touch, pressure, heat and cold, and pain. I found the faradic reaction of the intrinsic muscles of the thumb defective. With the galvanic current arheophore over the musculo- spiral nerve a little above the elbow showed that the closure contraction with the anode was equal to that with the kathode, and that there was an opeuing contraction with the kathode equal to that with the anode. These