Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/659

Rh Coughing is adapted for the purpose of expelling irritating substances from the respiratory passages, and thus preventing their injuring the organism, just as the act of winking is adapted to remove injurious substances from the eye. Coughing is usually excited by irritation of the nerves of that part of the body from which the irritant is to be removed. But coughing, like winking, may be reflexly induced by other nerves than those which usually excite it, and thus may prove hurtful instead of useful. Thus, in pleurisy, irritation of the pleura causes the same expulsive efforts as a foreign substance in the bronchi, although those efforts can expel nothing, and only cause pain to the patient; and even when the act of coughing is induced from the ordinary nervous channels, but where the irritant, like tubercle in the lungs, can not be removed, the act is likewise injurious. In the same way, vomiting is most frequently induced by the presence of irritating substances in the stomach, and proves useful by causing their rejection and thus relieving the stomach of their obnoxious presence. But when the irritation is due to inflammation of the walls of the stomach itself, the expulsive efforts of retching are quite useless, and only exhaust the patient. Here, too, the act of vomiting can be induced by irritation of other nerves than those of the stomach itself. Irritation of the pharyngeal branches of the glosso-pharyngeal and of the pulmonary branches of the vagus, irritation of the hepatic nerves by the passage of a biliary calculus, irritation of the renal nerves by a calculus resting in the kidney or passing down the urethra, irritation of the intestinal nerves (as, for instance, by incarceration of a hernia), irritation of the uterine nerves by the presence of a fœtus in the womb, or of the ovarian and vesical nerves by inflammation of the ovaries or bladder, may all produce vomiting; and in all, or nearly all, these cases, efforts at emesis will be productive of no beneficial result. When the irritation is further down the intestine, as when an ulcer is situated in the rectum, there is a constant desire to go to stool, but the only results of the expulsive efforts involved in its gratification are exhaustion of the patient and aggravation of the ulcerated condition. In the efforts of micturition, as in those of vomiting and defecation, we have combined movements of voluntary and involuntary muscles. The urine is retained in the bladder by the contraction of the sphincter surrounding its neck, and it is expelled by contraction of the body of the bladder itself with the assistance of the abdominal muscles. Both the sphincter of the neck of the bladder and the muscular walls of the organ itself may be reflexly excited to contraction, and we may thus have reflex incontinence or reflex retention. One of the most common causes of incontinence of urine, for example, is the presence of ascarides in the rectum; and while the ascarides remain we may employ drugs to cure the incontinence without success. An interesting case is described by Mr. Teevan in the "Practitioner" for October, 1876, where a boy had been treated in vain by medicine, but was at once cured by healing a fistula