The Journal of nervous and mental disease
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The purpose of this investigation was to determine whether the observation of Ferenczi and Purves-Stewart that conversion reactions occur with higher frequency on the left side of the body than on the right side could be confirmed. Both right-handed and left-handed patients experienced a higher proportion of left-sided symptoms (weakness or paralysis; sensory loss or numbness) than would be expected by chance, indicating a lack of support for the hypothesis that unilateral conversion symptoms occur most frequently on the most "convenient" (nondominant) side of the body. These findings and prior reports of left-sided lateralization of psychogenic pain were interpreted as support for the hypothesis that the right cerebral hemisphere is particularly involved in the mediation of affectively or motivationally determined somatic symptoms. The question of a possible link between these results and certain symptoms of disease of the right hemisphere was raised.
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Forty-six of 51 coronary bypass patients whose inhospital postoperative adjustment was reported earlier, were studied about 18 months postoperatively. In addition, 32 of 46 cardiac valvular surgery patients were seen as a comparison group. ⋯ There were no indications that patients who developed psychiatric symptoms in the immediate postoperative period than patients asymptomatic postoperatively. There was a significant relationship between preoperative psychiatric illness and symptoms in the follow-up period.
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J. Nerv. Ment. Dis. · Jul 1976
Biography Historical ArticleVenery, the spinal cord, and tabes dorsalis before Romberg: the contribution of Ernst Horn.
Usually Heinrich Romberg is credited with having established tabes dorsalis as a clinicopathological entity in the 1840s. But Romberg's teacher, Ernst Horn (1774 to 1848), had inspired five different students to write their doctoral dissertations on the same subject. These five theses, published between 1817 and 1827, as well as M. ⋯ The dissertations are analyzed together with the prior literature reflected in them as it deals with the spinal cord. Discussions of the putative influence of the spinal cord on the vagaries of male sexual function, and vice versa, began with "consumption of the backbone", referred to in the Hippocratic corpus. "Venery"--if not veneral disease as we understand it--was thought throughout the centuries to be the prime cause of tabes. One may presume that the rising concern with public health and with national aims--a kind of "moral rearmament"--caused the subject to be so vigorously pursued by members of the young medical generation in early 19th-century Germany.
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Case histories are presented for four psychotic patients who ingested large quantities of water and subsequently developed grand mal seizures and serum sodium levels of less than 121 meq/liter. The physiology of psychogenic polydipsia and related disorders is reviewed. The relation of this disorder to temporal lobe seizures and to the use of phenothiazines is considered.
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Previous studies of psychiatric complications following open heart surgery have included few if any patients who had coronary bypass surgery. This experiment reports the relative incidence of psychiatric complications in a sample of 97 open heart surgery patients of whom 51 patients (53 per cent) had coronary bypass surgery. The results suggest that the incidence of psychiatric symptoms following coronary bypass surgery is significantly lower (16 per cent) than that following cardiac valvular surgery (41 per cent). Several possible reasons for this large discrepancy in incidence of psychiatric complications are considered.