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

PATHOLOGY OF NERVE LESIONS. 61
order to find, if possible, a spot where the nerve is tender
on pressure, and where we would have a right to infer
that there might be a local congestion which could be
relieved by proper
Neuritis.— treatment.
Neuritis is in man one of the
most common
consequences of nerve wounds, and we might suppose
from this that it would be always easy to produce
it iu
animals by experimental interference with nerves. In
some of the lower animals, such as the dog, upon which
Dubreuihl made his observations, such inflammations
may be produced, but not with any great ease or certainty
for although in one animal a caustic or a seton occasions
more or less neuritis, in others this result altogether
fails us, while it is also exceptionally rare to bring ;
about
in these creatures any well-marked sclerosis.
In animals such as the short-eared rabbit, it is difficult
to produce neuritis by any plan of dealing with a nerve.
After numerous experiments, I succeeded but once, and
unfortunately did not see the animal again until too late
to study its neuritis in the active stage. It resulted in
the formation of a number of abscesses within the sheath
of the nerve. The nerve fibres in a degenerated state were
found passing over the outer walls of the abscesses, and
the resultant neural change passing upward had invaded
the spine, causing sclerotic alterations of the same lateral
half of the cord.
Acute neuritis. — This disease is
probably of extreme
rarity as an idiopathic affection. It occasionally arises
from wounds or from the inroads of cancer. I recall a
terrible instance of the latter causation iu a lady who
died after horrible agony from pelvic carcinoma. She
suffered from intense pain in the regions to which the
sciatic nerve is distributed ;
the pain being remittent,
—
increasing at night. The sciatic nerve was exquisitely
tender, and a distinct redness of skin accompanied its