Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SECTION IV. PATHOGENY. We will first make a few general remarks on the pathogeny of the subject under discussion. The fact that a disease of any part of the body should be the cause of disease in a symmetrical member must in any event seem something extraordinary. Human pathology up to this day has revealed but few phenomena of this nature. Norris, however, in his paper on sympathetic affections of the eye, speaks of a few analogous occurrences in other regions; for example, one case by Mitchell, Morehouse, and Keen, in which, after a gunshot wound on the outer side of the thigh, complete anaesthesia was noticed on the corresponding side of the other thigh; and another by Annandale, in which, after a wound on one hand had healed with a painful cicatrix, a similar condition developed on the other. Let us confine ourselves, however, to the eye, and at once inquire in what manner inflammation extends from one eye to the other. It would be an error to answer such a question in a general way. Entering therefore into details, we soon discover that the explanation is surrounded with difficulties of various degree, depending upon the locality of the inflammation. If we assume for example that the ophthalmoscope reveals an inflammation of the optic nerve and retina in the sympathetically affected eye, and that we are justified in assuming a similar inflammation in the injured eye (whose deeper structures we are usually unable to examine on account of entensive alterations in its anterior portion), we shall have no need of profound theories or the dragging in of obscure symptoms from other provinces of pathology, in order to understand what is going on. In case pathological anatomy does not plainly inform us of any other way, we can assume in such a case, that the inflammator...