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

NEURAL MALADIES OF STUMPS. 363
in performing the operation for relief early enough and
tar enough up the limb.
Chorea of stumps.
— I find nowhere any detailed account
ot the disease which, for lack of a better name, I have
called chorea of the stump. The muscles of stumps, of
arm-stumps especially, are constantly in what I might
call a condition of unstable equilibrium, liable to act
irregularly under volition, or to contract spasmodically
from emotion or from changes in the weather. The
mere act of thinking of the lost limb, or the concentration
of attention upon the stump, will, in many, suffice
to excite tremor, irregular brief contractions, or cramp ;
while in some persons quite violent spasms occur without
any assignable cause.
The stump muscles or nerves are in the condition of
those of a person fully charged with strychnia, ready to
respond excessively and without regularity to every excitation,
and this is especially true of irritable stumps on
which no artificial limb can be worn. Owing to this state of
excitability, it is easy in many stumps to cause twitching,
or still freer movement, by rolling the nerves under the
compressing finger, or by pushing them aside, and then
suddenly releasing them, vibrating them, so to speak.
These nerves are in just such a state as may be brought
about artificially in a healthy nerve it
by chilling with
ice, when the least tap will occasion sudden spasm.
jSTo
wonder, then, that more permanent spastic
affections of
stumps are occasionally met with.
I have myself seen and treated but two instances of wellmarked
choreoid disease, although through other physicians
I have had partial experience of a number of cases.
Ca.se 67.— I. C. suffered amputation of the left arm, in
Georgia, in 1863, for a wound of the forearm. I examined
him once, a year later, and have not heard of him since.
"While the stump was yet unhealed, in the fifth week, the