Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/92

82 and grayish tint of the ganglion. The pneumogastric portion now descends, passing before the lingual nerve and the jugular vein for a little distance, then behind, inclosed in the sheath of the carotid artery and jugular, rather closer to the vein than to the artery, to which it gives off filaments. The importance of this system will be evident when it is stated that it is principally concerned in the coördination of the functions of deglutition, articulation, respiration, circulation, and digestion. The three great functions of animal life, nutrition, respiration, and circulation, are, in briefer terms, mainly coordinated by the par vagum in its cervical, thoracic, and abdominal tracts. With the former and its filaments, and to a considerable degree with the thoracic, the specific influence of the tobacco has, in smoking, a contact exceedingly direct and protracted; and, if the general reader will trouble himself to map out in his own imagination the course, ramifications, and connections, of the pneumogastric system, he will see clearly that the congeries of symptoms occasioned by the initial cigar follows out, step by step, the complex relations of this tract to the vital functions, and that the physical and psychological exponents of the habit in its established stages are, similarly, the natural results of narcotism of this system, and of the great vital centre from which it springs.

To these general facts of observation let me now append the details of a series of experiments:

I had been an inveterate smoker for eight years, when, in the summer of 1872, certain symptoms resembling those of writer's cramp attacked the right arm, and gradually, though to a less alarming extent, enveloped the left. Physicians pronounced it a genuine case of writer's cramp; but, owing to the persistent absence of certain symptoms, among them brittleness and want of color in the fingernails, I was slow to accept the conclusion. There was reason enough why excessive scribbling should bring on the affection; but I was, nevertheless, doubtful, though I so far complied with the prescription as to have recourse to the ordinary electrical appliances insisted upon by Dr. Poore, in his admirable essays on the subject, which embody, in brief form, the memoranda of an expert of some years' practice.

As I half anticipated, the application was without material benefit. Tonics and nervines proved equally inefficacious, and for a year, with short intervals of relief, affairs did but get worse and worse. Blue ink, elastic pen-holders, and broad-nibbed pens, were altogether incapable of ameliorating the affection or mending the scrawling, irregular handwriting that resulted from it; and so essential is it that the hand and mind should work together in a kind of rhythm, in order to form a good style, or to preserve it when formed, that any affection of the nerves of the arm that breaks up this rhythm is nearly as fatal to the poet, essayist, and novelist, as to the artist or the pianist; and I soon found my sentences as cramped and dissonant as my manuscript.