Injuries of nerves and their consequences - Reflex Sympathetic ...

CHAPTER VIII.
SENSORY LESIONS.
— Alterations of sensation. The sensory functions of nerves
wounds in sucli a manner as to be lessened,
are affected by
exalted, or perverted, so that we have as results bypersesthesia,
anaesthesia, and all the varieties of pain, with
numberless sensations, for the describing of which language
fails us, so greatly do they vary with different cases
of injury.
— Hypersesthesia. Heightened sensibility, or that state in
which agents usually felt, as touch only, become painful,
is sutficiently common after many forms of nerve injury;
but I cannot recall a case in which it was an immediate
effect. In some of the older histories of lancet wounds,
and in many instances of ball wounds, it came on after
a few days, or later, and was one of the expressions of a
nerve, the polarity of which had become intensified by
inflammatory conditions. I have never been able to discover
that the tactile sense had been thus over-excited,
so that Weber's points could be distinguished as two,
where otherwise they could have been felt but as one.
When, indeed, there is hyperesthesia for pain, we are
apt to find it associated with lessened or lost power of
tactile appreciation, and this rather because of the confusing
influence of pain than necessarily from actual loss
of tactile appreciation. All cases of glossy skin with
causalgia were sure to exhibit hypersesthesia
of the
affected surfaces, or of regions near them ;
and this condition,
in a less intense degree, was likely, after a time, to
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