Vascular bronchocele and exophthalmos / [J. Warburton Begbie].

  • Begbie, James Warburton, 1826-1876.
Date:
1882
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Vascular bronchocele and exophthalmos / [J. Warburton Begbie]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    18/32 (page 184)
    and have loug attracted attention. Felix Plater, whose descrip- tion of cachexia has already been quoted, after speaking of various signs, remarks, “ Accidente simul pulsatione arteriarum circum jugulum and Rondelet observes, “ Noscitur pallidus color virginura, ex arteriarum colli pulsatione, et ex cordis palpitationibus.’ These writers are cited by M. Beau; and both he and M. Bouillaud, in their paroles before the Imperial Academy, have expressed the common experience of physicians when they said, that every day chlorotic girls ask our advice for palpitation of the heart and pulsations in the arteries, who believe themselves to be affected with some serious disease of the heart, and have already lost hope of recovery. As we have found the cardiac derangement to depend on a hsemic as w'ell as neurotic cause, so I believe in the same way may the pulsa- tions of the arteries be best explained. Allusion has been made to the supply of nerves to the heart; it is by minute branches of the same system that the blood-vessels throughout their most distant ramifications are embraced. The muscular apparatus, with its contractile property, chiefly resident in the small blood-vessels governing their diameter, receives no other nervous supply than from the sympathetic. Careful experi- ments have demonstrated the influence of the organic nervous system upon the calibre of blood-vessels both large and small. Those of Valentin and others, by which irritation of the sympa- thetic and the roots of the cervical nerves produced contractions in the aorta, and the still more important experiments of Waller on the former nerve in the neck, section or ligature of which caused enlargement of the minute arteries, accompanied by elevation of temperature, while application of the galvanic stimulant for a brief period effected their contraction to the ordinary calibre. In the disease under consideration, there is first of all increased unrhythmical pulsation of blood-vessels, and ultimately permanent dilatation—the proof of the latter oceurrence will be adverted to when I come to treat of the thyroidal enlargement and proptosis. That the influence of the vaso-motor nerves is perverted, and that from this cause results the irritation of blood-vessels, and ultimately the serious impair- ment of that structure in them by which through nervous energy the circulation is properly maintained, can scarcely be said to admit of doubt. The question is, whence arises this