The Origin and Nature of the Emotions; Miscellaneous Papers — John Shaqi
The Origin and Nature of the Emotions; Miscellaneous PapersCrile, George Washington
Science
The Origin and Nature of the Emotions; Miscellaneous Papers
Crile, George Washington
Emotions; Psychophysiology
of the lung is painless.
There is a third type of pain which modifies muscular action
in a curious way. We have already stated that local pain serves
an adaptive purpose. In this light let us now consider headache.
Headache is one of the commonest initiatory symptoms of the
various infections, especially of those infections which are
accompanied by no local pain and by no local muscular action.
In peritonitis, cholecystitis, pleurisy, arthritis, appendicitis,
salpingitis, child-birth, in obstructions of the intestinal
and the genito-urinary tract, in short, in those acute processes
in which the local symptoms are powerful enough to govern
the individual as a whole,--to make him lie down and keep quiet,
refuse food and possibly reject what is already in the stomach,--
in all these conditions there is rarely a headache, but in the diseases
in which local pain is absent, such as the exanthemata, typhoid fever,
and auto-intoxication, which have no dominating local disturbances
to act as policemen to put the individual to bed and to make him
refuse food that he may be in the most favorable position to combat
the oncoming disease, in such cases in which these masterful and
beneficent local influences are absent we postulate that headache
has been evolved to perform this important service.
On the hypothesis that it is good for the individual who is acutely
stricken by a disease or who is poisoned by autointoxication to rest
and fast, and that the muscular system obeys the imperial command
of pain, and in view of the fact that the brain is not only in constant
touch with the conditions of every part of the body but that it
is also the controlling organ of the body, one would expect that in
these diseases the major pain whose purpose it is to govern general
muscular action would be located in the head and there we find it.
How curious and yet how intelligible is the fact that, though a
headache may be induced by even a slight auto-intoxication,
an abscess may exist within the brain without causing pain.
When an obliterative endarteritis is threatening a leg with
anemic gangrene, or when one lies too long in the same position on
a hard bed, there is threatening injury from local anemia, and as a
result there is acute pain, but when the obliterative endarteritis
threatens anemia of the brain, or when an embolism or thrombosis has
produced anemia of the brain, there may be no accompanying pain.
The probable explanation of the pain which results in the first instance
and the lack of pain in the second is that in the former muscular action
constitutes a self-protective response, but in the other it does not.
Diseases and injuries of the brain are notoriously difficult
to diagnosticate. This may well be because it has always been so well
protected by the skull that there have been evolved within it few
tell-tale self-protective responses, so that in the presence of injury
and disease within itself the brain remains remarkably silent.
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