Excerpt from Progressive Medicine, Vol. 4: A Quarterly Digest of Advances, Discoveries and Improvements in the Medical and Surgical Sciences; December, 1919 Nervous System and Diseases of Digestion. It may be without the province of this review to deal with any material not directly referring to Diseases of the Alimentary Tract but I can not forbear to quote freely, sometimes verbatim for the sake of clarity, from the first lecture dealing with the Plan of the Autonomic System, in order that the second lecture dealing essentially with the subject of our review, may be the better understood. I do not expect that this abstract can offer all the information the reader may require, but, if it attains its object of stimulating him to study the original articles, much will have been accomplished. In no better way can this present review be commenced than by a lengthy reference to these admirable lectures by Brown. He first pays tribute to the memory of his great teacher Gaskell, who was the first to make clear the direction of the impulses in the sympathetic chain. To read an account of the sympathetic nervous system before Gaskell is like reading a description of the circulation of the blood before Harvey. Gaskell first showed that the nerve fibers of the sympathetic group were of smaller calibre than the nerves to the skeletal muscles, and hence he was able to Show that there were fibers with visceral functions in the cranial and sacral nerves, subserving the functions of organic life and not under the control of the will. The term autonomic nervous system devised by Langley, is one in gen eral use, and Brown classifies the whole of the visceral or involuntary nervous system as follows. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.