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

220 INJURIES OF NERVES.
Taste was restored to the tongue, although not perfectly.
Tact and pain were still absent.
October 20th.— There is some feelino^ in the tono-ue,
but no motion on the left side, and no change in the nutrition.
Returned to dut3% October 20, 1865.
Reflected palsy in remote regions, the result of a ball
wound, though rare, is not to be lost sight of. IS'or should
it be forgotten that when one nerve of a limb has been
subjected to prolonged pressure, as in Waller's experiments,
the loss of power may not be limited to its own
muscular distributions, but may also involve those which
had not been primarily injured. This efiect is too sudden
to be ascribed to progressive neuritis. As yet I have not
met with it in any clinical example of neural compression.
Loss of function in a part is usually sufficient to indicate
what nerve has been injured, and to what degree;
but as regards the hands, and perhaps also the feet, this
would seem to be less valuable as a diagnostic means
than might at first be supposed. There are, for example,
rare instances in which section of the median has failed
to cause loss of sensation or motion in the regions to
which it is
commonly distributed, while in other cases,
quite as uncommon, the return of function after section
has been so rapid as to have cast doubt upon the fact of
In
total nerve division, had this been other than certain.
the vast majority of instances, however, the loss of motion
in some muscles, and the defect of sense in
definite skin
spaces, will positively tell us what nerve has been hurt,
and also the extent of the lesion.
In case of doubt as to the completeness of the nerve
section, or in any of the anomalous examples of apparent
division with continuance of sensation in the distal
distribution of the hurt nerve, the use of faradaic currents
applied to the nerve above the wound would surely