Neuralgia and the diseases that resemble itAnstie, Francis Edmund
Science
Neuralgia and the diseases that resemble it
Anstie, Francis Edmund
Neuralgia
Galvanization of the brain is a remedy chiefly employed in true
migraine, and is certainly very effective in that disease. I have not
found it useful to apply the current in the long axis of the cranium,
but transmitted from one mastoid process to the other it has proved most
useful; and I am glad to find that my experience on this point coincides
with that of Eulenburg. But the use of this remedy is highly perilous in
careless hands. In working with either Daniell's or Weiss's battery, it
is necessary to use at first only three or four cells, and to increase
the number only with the greatest caution. The sittings should never
last more than half a minute; but the slightest giddiness should make us
stop even sooner. On the other hand, the applications ought to be made
daily, and usually twice a day. Ten cells (Daniell or Weiss) is the
utmost that will ever be required, few patients will bear so much; and,
apart from the possibility of more serious mischief, there is nothing
which annoys and frightens patients more seriously than the sudden and
intense vertigo which over-galvanization of the brain may induce.
Even more ticklish than the galvanization of the cerebral mass is
galvanization of the sympathetic. I am not going to raise here the vexed
question in physiological electricity as to the possibility of a
galvanization the effects of which shall be accurately limited to the
sympathetic. The fact is unquestionable, that very powerful and peculiar
effects, utterly unprocurable in any other way, can be produced by
placing one pole on the superior cervical ganglion (just behind and
below the angle of the jaw) and the other on the manubrium sterni. This
is a mode of galvanization which has been highly praised, more
especially by Remak, and after him by Benedikt, but it has yielded
rather disappointing results in neuralgia in my hands. Either I have not
observed any distinct effect at all, or, if a current even a very little
too strong were applied, I have repeatedly seen most uncomfortable, and
sometimes very alarming, symptoms. I shall not easily forget a patient
who applied at the Westminster Hospital, suffering from a severe form of
facial neuralgia, and who was persuaded to come to my house and have his
sympathetic galvanized. I used only twenty cells of Daniell, but the
current had not been applied more than a few seconds when the patient
fell on the floor, and remained in a state of half swoon for a
considerable time. I allude to this and other less dangerous accidents
that I have seen follow galvanization of the sympathetic, not with the
view to prove that the method is useless in trigeminal neuralgia--I
should certainly hesitate to say that, considering the large amount of
respectable evidence in its favor--but I think that it is a procedure
requiring the utmost caution, and meantime I have not personally found
it nearly so useful as the methods already described.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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