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

NEURAL MALADIES OF STUMPS. 347
Gueiiiot* speaks of the same
lost her arm at the shoulder.
Motor ijhenomena.
— The ease
symptom
iu a woman who
and dexterity with which
many persons use their stumps evince how little the
muscles may sutler. Excepting near to their attachment
to the divided bone or to the tissues of the cicatrix, the
muscles I have examined were sound. In most mobile
stumps they react with electricity as well as those of the
entire limb, and in patients afflicted -with twitching or
choreoid movements, so called, they are often over-excitable,
and very sensitive to the pain caused by induced
currents.
The motility of muscular stumps
is
very apt to be disturbed
by mental emotions, and even the most healthy
are liable, when excited, to sudden and annoying discharges
of motor nerve power. These are sometimes
only fibrillar spasms, in others they are cramp-like, and
in some are productive of sudden and violent motion in
one direction. They are apt to cause pain, even severe
pain, and are most common in the arm and in patients
I have
who sutler constantly with twitching of the stump.
attended one gentleman who has a very useful arm-stump,
but who at times is
compelled to seize and confine it at the
side in order to terminate a spasm of the deltoid, which
gives great pain in the nerve tracks, and which has once at
least been the starting-point of a sharp attack of neuritis.
While emotion may cause involuntary movement, it may
also check choreiform spasms, as in the case of Colonel
Parr, whose arm-stump was never at
repose a moment,
except when, at Cedar ^lountain, his regiment being cut
ott'for a time, and in danger of being taken,— the restless
limb was seen for some hours to hano; motionless at his
* D'une Hallucination du Toucher, Journal de la Physiologic, 1861,
p. 418.