A Treatise on the Eclectic Southern Practice of Medicine Page: 462 of 724

                                
produces a loss of motion and sensibility, but likewise a
considerable flacidity and wasting away in the muscles
of the parts affected.
The most perfect form of cerebral palsy is hemiplegia,
in which the affection extends over the whole of one
side of the body, from the head to the foot. Sometimes
it takes the form of paraplegia, or palsy of the lower
extremities; and in some rare instances the affection is
confined to the loss of functions in a particular nerve.
Hemiplegia, to which form of the disease the term
palsy is in common language appropriated, has generally
been considered as a minor degree of apoplexy. The
attack is sometimes unexpected, but more commonly it
is preceded for several days, or even weeks, by one or
more of those symptoms formerly described as the fore-
runners of apoplexy; such as giddiness, drowsiness,
numbness, dimness of sight, failure of the powers of the
mind, forgetfulness, transient delirium, or indistinctness
of articulation. For the most part the paralytic seizure
is sudden ; but occasionally the approaches of the disease
are made more slowly, a finger, a hand or an arm, the
muscles of the tongue, of the mouth, or of the eyelids
being first affected, and the paralytic state gradually
extending to distant parts.
This variety is not generally perfect paralysis, from
the fact that the eye, the ear, nose and tongue of the
affected side, have their senses actively enough. It may
be a mere hysterical affection, and soon recovered from.
Sir G. Blune says, from some comparative observa-
tions made by him when physician of St. Thomas' Hos-
pital, that he found three cases of hemiplegia on the
left side, for two on the right. The pulse on the
paralytic side is smaller than on the other.

462

PALSY.