A system of practical medicine. By American authors. Vol. 4

by Unknown

⁷ London Medical Gazette, vol. vii., 1830-31, p. 201.

⁸ Outlines of Human Pathology, London, 1836.

⁹ Archives générales de Méd., t. xxiv., Sept. and Oct., 1850.

Cruveilhier's studies were commenced as early as 1832, but his results were not published until March, 1853,¹⁰ when he read his memoir before the Academy of Medicine of Paris. He seems to have made the first autopsy, and was much surprised at the absence of any apparent lesion of the spinal cord. So enthusiastic and so exhaustive was his study of the disease that his name, too, has become almost inseparably associated with it, and the term Cruveilhier's atrophy is one of those by which it is known. He concluded from his earlier autopsies that the lesions were solely in the muscular system, which is progressively destroyed, while the brain and spinal cord may remain perfectly normal. In a later case (his third), terminating January, 1853, he found atrophy of the anterior roots of the spinal nerves, and then concluded that the disease resided "not in the muscles themselves, but in the anterior roots of the spinal nerves." But after the termination of his fourth case, in which an autopsy was also secured, he placed the primary lesion in the gray matter of the cord, whence he considered the anterior roots take their origin.

¹⁰ Ibid., May, 1853, p. 561.

Thouvenet,¹¹ an interne of Cruveilhier's, published in 1851 a thesis based on some cases collected in the Charité, and was the first to claim that the disease resides primarily in the peripheral nerves, and that it must be classed among rheumatic affections.

¹¹ Gaz. des Hôp., Nos. 143 and 145, 1851.

In December, 1851, E. Meryon¹² read a paper before the Medico-Chirurgical Society of London entitled "Granular and Fatty Degeneration of the Voluntary Muscles." His observations appear to have been made quite independently of any preceding researches. He argues that the primary morbid change is a default of nutrition in the muscular fibres.

¹² Med.-Chir. Trans., vol. xxxv. p. 73.

Subsequently, cases were published in 1853 by Bouvier, Landry, Burg, and Niepce in France; in 1854 by Chambers in England, Guérin and Robin in France, Cohn, Virchow, and Betz in Germany, and by Schneevogt in Holland; in 1855 laborious essays were published by Oppenheimer, Wachsmuth, and Eisenmann, and cases by Hasse, Valentiner, Virchow, Meyer, and Diemer in Germany, and Gros in France. Duchenne's work on Local Application of Electricity, also published in 1855, contains much information on the subject.