Failure Of Sight From Railway And Other Injuries Of The Spine And Head - Its Nature And Treatment (1869) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. SIGNIFICATION OF THE SUBJECTIVE SYMPTOMS WHICH PRESENTED THEMSELVES IN THE CASES RELATED. Loss of memory, confusion of thought, inability to concentrate the attention on any subject, and horrible dreams, were symptoms of mental disturbance, while the perversion or failure of the senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and, in part, touch also, in the various modes and degrees mentioned, were symptoms of sensorial disturbance; both sets of symptoms indicating implication of the brain, either directly at the time of the accident, or consecutively by transmission to the brain of morbid action from the primarily injured spinal cord. The disturbances of the motor power were chiefly due to the injury of the spinal cord, as we shall see; but some of them, also, such as the general impairment of the muscular energy, no doubt arose from the cerebral implication. ASTHENOPIC SYMPTOMS. Inability of the patient to exert his sight longer than a few minutes, even though he may still be able to make out the smallest print, was, we have seen, astriking symptom in all the cases related. This as- thenopia, it is to be observed, is not owing merely to impaired power of maintaining the adjustment of the eyes for the exercise of the sight on near objects, as in the common form of the complaint, but is owing also in part to the erethism or state of irritable weakness in which the eyes are, and which is a manifestation of impaired vital energy of the optic nervous apparatus occasioned by disturbance of the circulation in it. The patients have sometimes, indeed, appeared to be helped by convex glasses, as in common asthenopia; but it has always struck me that it was as much or more by their mere magnifying power, as in amblyopia or defective sensibility of the retina, that t...