Book Description

Excerpt from The British Journal of Children's Diseases, 1920, Vol. 17 Much recent work has been done on poliomyelitis, especially from the pathological point of view, and extensive experimental investigations have been made on the disease in monkeys. Buzzard's conception of the disease was a distinct advance on the one that this disease was entirely an affection of the anterior cornual cells of the spinal cord and was localised to them. A more recent and perhaps wider point of view is that there is an acute inflammatory process in the central nervous system over a wide-spread area, and that there are also visceral lesions especially in the lymphatic organs. The cause of this acute specific fever is stated by Flexner to be a minute filterable micro-organism, which has been secured by him in artificial culture, and is distinctly visible under the higher powers of the microscope. The virus is suspected to enter the body by way of the mucous membrane of the nose and throat. The conception of the disease which expressed itself only in terms of the old atrophic lesions in the anterior cornual cells was necessarily narrow, and concerned only with the resulting paralysis, which should really be regarded as an incidental occurrence in a general infectious disease. This view for a long time dominated all ideals of treatment, and prevented a hopeful attitude being formulated or maintained; the inherent possibilities of recovery in the muscle were ignored, and no hope was entertained of sufficient anterior horn-cells having survived or recovered. Mackenzie, who was a pioneer in the field of muscle re-education in infantile paralysis and who is chiefly responsible for this method of treatment, began his work at the muscle end of the neuro-muscular system, and having proved that muscle power was recoverable in old cases of paralysis, he was impressed with the urgent necessity of beginning this line of treatment as early as possible in recent cases. Draper makes another point when he says - "It is curious that notwithstanding the gradual realisation, resulting from many severe epidemics, that the malady was of an infectious nature, clinicians and the public have been loth to give up the fixed conception that paralysis is the beginning and end of the story. The term "infantile paralysis" is doubly a misnomer, as it leads us to consider the disease as one of infancy only, and secondly to consider the paralysis as an essential part of the disease; it has recently been pointed out that non-paralysed cases comprise 50 percent, of patients affected, and some observers put the numbers as high as 70 percent. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.