The Dental Cosmos (Volume 14) (Paperback)

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: CLINICAL REPORTS. UNIVEBSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA. Clinic Of James E. Garretson, M. D. REPORTED HY Ill'ORUST WILLARD, M. D. Neuralgia Dependent Upon Granules Of Osteo-pentine. This man, fifty-six years of ago, comes to us with a neuralgia which has existed for years. Now, neuralgia?nerve.pain?is not a disease of itself, but is dependent upon a cause, which cause may be either evident or concealed. There may be cases where present knowledge is insufficient to enlighten us, but this is no proof that a source does not exist, and we must not remain quiescent in our ignorance while there is an organ or tissue in the body which has not been interrogated and examined. Those of you who were present last year will remember an old man who had suffered with this disease for sixty years, yet was cured by simply removing the exciting causes of nerve irritation,?several old fangs and worn teeth. If, then, pain is but the result of a cause, can you not see that nervines are useless, save as they accidentally reach the mark and alleviate pain by their anodyne properties, and that the onlv hope of cure is in the discovery and removal of the cause or causes ? The point affected with neuralgia seldom gives any of the common evidences of inflammation, and the nerve structure is but rarely sensibly altered, save when the irritation has been long continued. This man locates his points of pain along the various branches of the fifth pair of nerves, which is the nerve of sensation to this portion of the body. The three points of emergence of the several branches upon the face are respectively the supra- and infra-orbital and mental foramina. An irritation applied to any one of these branches is capable of arousing all the others, producing intense neuralgia. Thus you can easily see how d...