General Paresis Volume 14

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1913 Excerpt: ...His paresis developed twelve years after the syphilitic infection and three years after the onset of tabes. At the conclusion of a severe phlegmon with fever lasting four months, a remission of eight years occurred, during which, however, the tabes persisted. Other cases of pronounced improvement following prolonged purulent affections have often been recorded; Steiner saw a remission after erysipelas, Marie and Pelletier after the development of a perforating ulcer. The last stages of the disease are the same in all its forms, with the exception of those which terminate early. The patient becomes steadily duller and more demented; he no longer recognizes objects or persons about him; understands neither commands nor gestures and finally is hardly more than a vegetating body in which the psychic life is almost or quite lost. At times there is a temporary excitement with monotonous cries and roars, lasting hours and days. The nervous disturbances also progress steadily. The patient is almost entirely insensitive; the weakness increases; rigidities, intention tremors, contractures and general muscular atrophy occur, so that the patient loses all capacity for voluntary movements. He grows more and more emaciated and is constantly very uncleanly, requiring to be cared for like a child. There are, to be sure, various intermediate forms leading up to this last stage of dementia and helplessness, which are differentiated from one another by varied degrees of retention of mental alertness, residuals of depressed or expansive moods and ideas, as well as by the different distribution of the various disturbances. Term1nat1on The termination3 of paresis is regularly death. We are accustomed, in view of an overwhelming number of observations, to regard as paresis only t...