Page:A history of laryngology and rhinology (1914).djvu/331

Rh criticism of the now commonly accepted views of Semon, while the publications of Möller and of Kuttner further complicate it.

Throughout this period of discussion, a set of cases was repeatedly described, exhibiting involvement of the posterior cranial nerves supplying the palate and pharynx, the tongue, the larynx, and the sternocleidomastoid muscle. Though Gleitsmann credits Avellis with being the first to emphasize it, and it is sometimes spoken of in late years as the Jackson-Avellis complex or syndrome, it was as long ago as 1864 that Hughlings Jackson drew attention to the subject. In Türck's book, which was published in 1866, there is a full account of such a case. Pel reported a case in 1887, and Wright reported one in 1889.

Dr. J. Shelton Horsley has reported a case in which after a gunshot wound of the recurrent nerve, followed by laryngeal paralysis, the nerve was sutured with restoration of function on that side, but it is not entirely clear that there was in the first place an entire solution of continuity of the nerve fibers. The case, however, deserves mention as it may encourage further attempts of a surgical nature in proper though necessarily rare cases, even of a pathological nature.

I have already traced with some care the history of laryngeal growths and the operations for their removal up to the time of the perfection of the technique of the intralaryngeal operation. It soon became apparent that the latter could not be extended with satisfactory results to malignant growths, especially at a time when their differentiation at an early stage was still undeveloped. We find, therefore, that at an early period in the development of laryngoscopical diagnosis, intralaryngeal procedures for their removal did little more than aggravate the local condition, and very soon such attempts were, for the time at least, all but abandoned.

Laryngotomy.—We have noted records of the opening of the wind-pipe for a foreign body a hundred years before, and although