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

34 INJURIES OF NERVES.
each of these conditions in limbs, or portions of limbs, and
have watched in vain for their results in the way of nutritive
mischief.
The best cases are those in which prolonged spasm of
the vasal muscles of one limb has been caused by wound
of another. In such rare cases the temperature may be
remarkably lowered for weeks, thus showing lessened
blood supply without the appearance of any remarkable
nutritive changes.
If the vaso-motor nerves were alone responsible for the
existence of all the lesions which follow nerve wounds, it
would be reasonable to expect always to meet with some
rise or fall in temperature. Such, however, is not the case,
and I have frequently met with profound trophic changes
unattended by thermal perturbations and the same remark
has been made by other neuro-pathologists.
;
It is also difficult to explain, on the theory of changes
in vasal supply, the completeness of some of the trophic
conditions attendant upon nerve wounds, or central disease,
for it seems scarcely possible to conceive that without
the least apparent change in the appearance or color
of the related part there could be, from lack of blood, or
its excess, that absolute arrest of growth which I have
shown to occur for a time in the nails after certain cerebral
palsies.
For' such reasons, then, I am unwilling to admit that
vaso-motor nerve lesions have any other share in the production
of the tissue changes which may follow nerve
wounds than merely to prepare the ground for their production
by other more direct agencies.
In 1858, Brown-Sequard first distinctly expressed the
opinion that "the nervous system determines an increase
of the attraction exerted upon the blood by the living
tissues, and, in this case, the is
phenomenon attended
by dilatation of blood-vessels. The nervous system acts