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

36 • INJURIES OF NERVES.
nerves, in the track of which in the skin were developed
herpetic eruptions with neuralgia, appeared to be a valuable
confirmation of Samuel's views; but the attendant
neuralgia, showing an affection of sensory fibres, weakens
the evidence which would have been perfect if there
had been a painless herpes with some disease of the
ganglia.
The phenomena of nerve wounds, as I have seen them,
lend no conclusive support to the theory, and there are in
them, as in many other pathological facts, certain arguments
in favor of the possibility of disorders of nutrition
being capable of production by the irritation of ordinary
nerves of sensation, and, indeed, of motion.
Among these are the grave changes which sometimes
occur in tissues affected with neuralgias, and also the phenomena
of muscular atrophies. It is, moreover, to be
remembered that the functional activities of skin and
muscle have some distinct and close relations to the preservation
of their nutritive life, and that pathological irritations
do not traverse nerves of motion or sensation in
one direction only, but disturb them really from end to
influence abnor-
end, and may thus, in any case, come to
mally the tissues in which lie their ultimate filaments. At
present it seems alone clear that while neural and central
irritations alike are competent to pathologically disturb
the status of nutritive health, we are without absolute
proof of the existence of true trophic nerves, devoted
solely to regulating nutrition, and are equally without just
reasons for asserting that the nerves of sense and motion
may not be largelj^ concerned in propagating to the tissues
irritative and other influences quite competent to occasion
disease.
There exist, in fact, certain observations of Vulpian
and Phillipeaux which make it
probable that the nutritive
integrity of tissues depends chiefly upon that of the nerves