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

PATHOLOGY OF NERVE LESIONS. 65
earlier paiu of his disease; and even when seen by me
after it had abated, he showed very plainly that the mind
as well as the body had suffered,— his memory being impaired,
and his temper excessively irritable.
This was a
very good example of acute traumatic neuritis passing
into the chronic form.
Case 3.— L. P., a sergeant, was shot through the middle
third of the thigh in the battle of Fredericksburg, and
reached our wards within seven days. Whether the ball
wounded the sciatic nerve or not was uncertain, but it
must at least have bruised it,
since there was some loss
of power and of feeling.
A small abscess in the walls of the wound of exit discharged
itself with a fragment of clothing on the morning
of the eighth day, and that evening he had a slight chill
followed by fever and occasional rigors, lasting all night.
There was sharp pain in the wound, and, before next
morning, agonizing aching down the sciatic distribution,
with intense burning in the foot. All next day the man
was delirious, his face flushed, his pulse 130 and upwards,
his tongue red and dry.
He begged
at times to be killed,
at others, to go home; while sometimes he would lie openeyed,
regarding ferociously the passers-by who shook his
bed as they walked, every movement seeming to add to
his torment. On the third day the fever abated and his
pulse He fell. said the pain was no better; but by this
time he was quite unmanned, and his evidence was valueless.
He would at this time, however, allow me to handle
It was
the limb, which he had, until then, refused to do.
slightly swollen, bathed in profuse sweat, as it had been
throughout the attack, and the nerve track was exquisitely
tender; when, indeed, an assistant rudely pressed upon it,
he shrieked with pain, and grew faint, pallid,
and sick at
the stomach. I could detect no band of redness over the
nerve, but at two places, between the wound and the