Neuralgia and the diseases that resemble itAnstie, Francis Edmund
Science
Neuralgia and the diseases that resemble it
Anstie, Francis Edmund
Neuralgia
Change in the size and texture of the hairs, in neuralgia, has been
noted by Romberg and Notta, and has been several times observed by
myself. Occasionally the individual hairs near the distribution of the
painful nerve become coarsely hypertrophied; at times the number of
hairs appears to multiply, but I imagine this is only a case of more
rapid and exuberant development of hairs that would be otherwise weak
and small. In one very remarkable instance of sciatica this came under
my observation; the whole front of the painful leg, from the knee nearly
to the ankle, became clothed, in the course of about six months, with a
dense fell of hair, which strongly reminded me of similar abnormal
hair-growths that have been occasionally seen in connection with
traumatic injuries to the spinal cord. More commonly, the effect of
neuralgia upon hair is to make it brittle, and to cause it to fall out
in considerable quantities; one young lady, who consulted me for a
severe migraine, was seriously afraid of having a good head of hair
completely ruined in this way, but the hair gradually grew again after
the neuralgia had disappeared.
(_b_) The periosteum of bone and the fibrous fasciæ in the neighborhood
of the painful points of neuralgic nerves not unfrequently take on a
condition of subacute inflammation, with marked thickening and
tenderness on pressure. The most striking instance of this that I have
seen was in a lady suffering from severe cervico-brachial neuralgia. In
the neighborhood of the emergence of the musculo-spiral nerve at the
outer side of the arm, there was developed what looked for all the world
like a large syphilitic node, except that the skin was brightly reddened
over it; this disappeared altogether some little time after the
neuralgia had been relieved by ordinary treatment. I must say that, but
for the peculiar circumstances of the case, putting syphilis out of the
question, I could not have avoided the suspicion, at first, that the
swelling was specific. But I have several times seen similar, though
less developed, swellings in neuralgia, and in one case I noticed the
occurrence of such a swelling on the malar bone, in an old woman in whom
the neuralgic pain was limited to the auriculo-temporal and the
supra-orbital branches of the fifth.
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