The quarterly general meeting of the Association was held on Thursday, May 31st, at the Medical Society's Rooms, Chandos Street, London, W., under the presidency of Dr. Outterson Wood.
Epilepsy and changes in the blood and nervous system
Dr. John Turner read a paper entitled The Relation of Epilepsy to Changes in the Blood and Central Nervous System. He stated that epilepsy was the result of a double cause or tendency, the one an inherently-defective nervous system from a hereditarily-vicious organization, and the other some morbid condition of the blood whereby it shows a special tendency to intravascular clotting, and that the immediate cause of the fits is sudden stasis of the blood stream, resulting from the blocking of cerebral vessels by these intravascular clots. The fits he regarded as only a symptom of the general epileptic condition. Further investigations were related as to the coagulability of the blood in epileptics, which was shown to increase at the times of petit mal, grand mal, and stasis. Forms of changes in the nerve cells were shown, resembling those described as réaction á distance, and persistence of large numbers of subcortical nerve cells was shown. The author also referred to experimental work by ligature of the cerebral arteries in the dog, with acute forms of cell changes. The blood was shown to have a large number of blood plates, and specimens were shown of different forms of intravascular clotting, probably in a large measure derived from amalgamation of the blood plates. Small cortical haemorrhages were also described and shown on the screen, which could be traced to rupture of a vessel blocked up by the clots of coagulated blood referred to.
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