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

258 INJURIES OF NERVES.
We used injections of atropia, loliich loere thrown into the
mass of the muscle itself.
At first this caused increased
contraction, but within a few minutes entire relaxation
ensued. The muscle never again acted as powerfully, and
successive injections at intervals of a day or two brought
about a cure.
The same means were used with equal good fortune in
a case of spasm of the abductor minimi digiti,
but unfortunately
the notes of this case are lost, so that I am unable
to state either the cause of the spasm or the details of its
recovery. In longer muscles, such as the fl.exor carpi
ulnaris, this treatment usually failed us. In at least two
cases, however, which I have seen since then, the happiest
results followed its use in spasm of unknown origin in
the right trapezius muscle, and also in spastic contraction
of the biceps.
I have many times endeavored to relieve these contractions,
and those which succeed some cases of cerebral
apoplex}^ by faradising their opponents. Unlike Duchenne,
I have had unvarying ill success, chiefly because
the currents excite reflectively the contracted muscles,
and this was also the uniform report in all such eflbrts
made at the U. S. A. Hospital for Nervous Diseases, etc.*
Treatment of joint disease.— The most mischievous of all
the consequences of nerve injuries, of all of them the
most fertile in direct and indirect evil, are certainly the
joint inflammations. A case may be doing perfectly well,
when suddenly or slowly one joint after another becomes
swollen, and
stiflJ", painful. When this happens, the members
remain, as it were, set in the false positions into
which contractions, palsies, or atrophic shortenings have
dragged them. Exercise becomes impossible,
from the
* Even when some relaxation has seemed to be caused by long electrization,
there has been really no gain of the least practical value.