Diseases of the Nervous System
- Author:
Julius Altiiaus, M.D.,
M.R.C.P., Senior Physician to the Hospital for Epilepsy and Paralysis, Regent’s Park. London : Smith, Elder and Co. This is a valuable treatise on the pathology and physiology of the nervous system by a physician of large experience, who has accumulated a great amount of information on the subject of which he treats. In the first chapter he endeavours to settle the question as to the prevalence and fatality of nervous diseases. As statistics are notoriously untrustworthy, a consideration of the deductions to be drawn from them could lead to no positive conclusion.
Dr Althaus’s observations on the functions of the spinal cord will be read with interest. He gives a succinct account of all that is yet known of the nervous centres of this organ ; but his attempt to localise the cerebral faculties is a failure. He lays too much stress on the results of recent experiments by Fritsch, Hitzig, Ferrier, and other cerebral physiologists. Brown-Sequard, whose opinion is of more importance than all these put together, differs entirely from them, and is scarcely likely to return to the principles he has abandoned, as I)r. Althaus expects liim to do. If the centres of motion and sen- sation cannot be determined, it is useless to talk of aphasia being’ the result of lesion of an especial portion of one side of the brain. It has been supposed by Broca and Moxon that the faculty of speech was in some way connected with the frequent use of the right side of the body and the left side of the brain. This is a most fanciful theory. If it be true, as Zarini, the great authority on gymnastics, reports, that all his pupils, how- ever one-sided when they came to him, became ambidextrous by constant practice, the brains of his pupils must be strangely twisted in the course of their exercises.
The chapters on epilepsy and paralysis will repay a careful study.
We are glad to learn from the preface that Dr Althaus intends to publish another volume, which will be devoted to the treatment of nervous diseases.
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