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

216 INJURIES OF NERVES.
elbow must have traveled up to the plexus and thus involved
the shoulder branches.
Far more uncommon are the cases in which a bullet
has split,
and one fr;igment or a piece of splintered bone
has implicated some distant nerve. Perhaps there exists
no more interesting instance of this than the case of Seymour,
which I transfer from my Keport to the Sanitary
Commission as a rare illustration of the difficulties which
this singular accident may introduce into the diagnosis of
a case.
Case 39.— Wound of left neck and jaw ;
loss of speech and
deglutition; secondary hemorrhage ; attempted ligature of right
primitive carotid folloiced hy palsy of right arm ; amesthesia of
right side of jaw and face ; loss of gustcdion in right side of
tongue, also of touch, pcdn, and thermal sense ; no loss of motion
in right side of tongue; left side of tongue paralyzed as
to motion only and atroi^hied ; section of left lingual nerve,
of hypoglossal, and of right lingual branch of glosso-pharyngecd
nerve ; injury by splinter of bone to inferior branch of fifth
nerve; recovery. Wm. Sej'mour, aged twenty, sailor.
On May 5, 1865, in the Wilderness, while ramming a
load, he was shot from the branches of a tree on his
left. The ball entered one and a half inches immediately
below the left auditory meatus, touching the
lower lobe of the ear; it slightly splintered the posterior
angle of the lower jaw-bone, and passed across the throat
much below the level of the tongue, though as to its
exact path
little is known. It made exit in the right
side of the neck at a level with the lower edge of the
thyroid cartilage, through the sterno-cleido-mastoid muscle,
about one and a half inches above the clavicle, and
two and a quarter inches from the middle line. He fell
senseless, lay thus about an hour, and then awakening,
crept half a mile, as he thinks, both wounds bleeding in
jets. He now tilled the wounds with dust, and so checked