The intestines undergo an augmentation in peristalsis and borborygmi are heard.
The bladder invariably contracts, as M. Laborde has also seen.
The orbital capsule of the eye (smooth muscle) propels the eye-ball forward.
The pupil is dilated.
In a word, all the smooth-fibred muscles or muscles of organic life, subordinate to the great sympathetic nervous system constrictor, undergo an augmentation of functional activity.
In a second essay (Comptes-rendus, Société de Biologie, Dec. 17, 1887), the same experimenter studied more particularly the mechanism of the local or general analgesic action of Cocaine, and, like M. Arloing, as opposed to M. Laborde, he found that the cerebral perceptibility was not deadened, by a physiological dose, but on the contrary, increased.
The action of Cocaine on the nervous system is not exerted by the intervention of vascular constriction; it is a generalized exciting action, and a state of peripheric non-receptivity of external impressions[13] in the nervous extremities of the sensory nerves and the nerves of general sensation.
Cocaine, according to M. Laffont, is not the antagonist of curare, as M. Laborde describes it, but quite the contrary, a particular curare, acting like it on the periphery, and not affecting the nervous centers, the functional action of which is exaggerated thereby.
M. le docteur Beugniès-Corbeau describes fully in the Revue hebdomadaire de Thérapeutique générale et thermale, the internal effects of Coca, until now so obscure, and in regard to which no concrete doctrine had been formulated until M. le docteur Laffont presented to the Académie de Médecine his researches. He shows that Coca, from its active principles, should have these entirely distinct actions:
1o Action on the protoplasm of the nervous extremities of the sensory nerves and on the nerves of general sensibility, producing non-transmissibility to the nerves of painful and even sensorized impressions, in a large dose;