TREATING PARALYSIS.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXV, Issue 4646, 9 January 1924, Page 1

TREATING PARALYSIS.

OPERATIONS IN SYDNEY. remarkable results. Remarkable operations nave recently been performed in Sydney for the treatment of certain kinds of paralysis in the limbs of human beings. The success of this ne.w development in surgery was demonstrated in the case of the first patient treated, a returned soldier, the freedom of whose affected limbs quickly reasserted itself.

The operation has been devised as a result of the collaboration of the Professor of Anatomy at the Sydney University with a well-known Sydney specialist, and it is hoped that when it becomes better known and more practised it will be the means of affording considerable relief to many sufferers, for whom, formerly, little or nothing could be done. The discovery of the operation suggested itself on the completion of some valuable and highly specialised research on the nervous system, into which and out of which the nerves run, and which is hidden away in the skull, in the cavity of what is called tlie backbone. In the last 10 years it hate been definitely shown by workers in Germany and Holland that the voluntary muscles receive nerve supply not only from the voluntary nervous system, but»also from the involuntary nervous system. Although this point was anatomatically established in 1919 by experimental work conducted in Holland, the function of the involuntary nerve supply had not been determined. Experiments which had been directed to ascertain this function had .given very inconsistent results, and were regarded by English and American neurologists as being totally unconvincing.

Sonie time ago a Sydney specialist, as a result of his investigations, became convinced that patients suffering from spastic or rigid paralysis owed in considerable measure the disability they suffered from to the released' activity of the involuntary nerves mentioned above.

With this idea in view he conducted, in consultation with the staff of the School of Anatomy in the Sydney University, some preliminary experiments to determine the function of these involuntary nerves under normal conditions. It was show by an interesting series of experiments, which were conducted in the anatomy department of the Sydney University, that the function is to maintain muscles in any position which they may assume, for instance, as the result of a voluntary' movement: for when they are removed the limb from which these fibres are lacking takes up a position determined by purely mechanical factors. As an example, a person may decide to raise his arm into a certain position. The voluntary nervous system almost immediately allows him to do ,so, and the aim moves to the position dehired. When once in that position the arm stays where it has been put, unless the person voluntarily chooses to alter the position in which he had placed his arm previously, the involuntary nervous system maintaining the arm’s position with the minimum expenditure of energy.

This re,search clearly indicated that the involuntary nervous system was responsible for the maintenance of an element' in the tone of the voluntary muscles. This element is called “plastic tone,” because it endows upon muscles the properties of a plastic body, enabling it to maintain any position in which it may be placed.

The success of these experiments afforded sufficient justification for the Sydney specialist operating for the first time on a humati patient, with a view to reducing the rigidity of paralysed limbs, consequent upon injury to the brain. The subject of this operation was a returned soldier, who was seriously injured in 1917. For several years , the patient was scarcely able to walk, and for about three years prior to being operated upon his condition was of such a nature that it would have shown little improvement in ordinary circumstances. Briefly described, the operation, which wa!s. performed on him at the big city hospital, consisted in the severing of the involuntary nerves from the voluntary nervous system. The success which attended the surgeon’s efforts was astonishing. The rigidity immediately, disappeared, and freedom of the affected limbs sojn reasserted itself. Now the patient is able to maintain his erect ppsure, walk upstairs or downstairs, and forwards or backwards, with the minimum amount of disability, and the operation, it is considered, must be regarded as a distinct advance in the surgery of the nervous system. This operation performed on the returned soldier was egarded as sufficient to prove that it could be confidently extended-to other's labouring under somewhat similar disabilities. Since it was carried out a series of operations has been performed on other patients with equally gratifying results. They have been considerably relieved of paralysis in the upper extremity of the body, operations that have been performed on some individuals who had suffered from certain forms of paralysis since birth have also been successful. As .soon as Professor J. T. Wilson, formerly Professor of Anatomy at the Sydney University, but now of Cambridge University .where he holds the Chair of Anatomy, heard of the remarkable operative work that had been accomplished, he cabled to Sydney for details of it to be forwarded to London for presentation before the learned societies of England,