Thoracolumbar Sympathectomies Examined with the Electrical Skin Resistance Method

Richter, Curt P.; Otenasek, Frank J.

doi:10.3171/jns.1946.3.2.0120

Cited by 20 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Richter collaborated on studies in monkeys (Bruesch and Richter 1946) and humans (Richter and Otenasek 1946), looking at different regions of the body under various experimental conditions after different kinds of sympathectomies. The results, on the whole, tended to reflect greater electrical skin resistance in patients with denervated regions.…”

Section: L I N I Cmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…So it was that during the war Richter and his colleagues continued to look at a number of clinical populations with the portable dermometer. He continued to note great variations in skin resistance in the populations he studied (Richter and Otenasek 1946). Richter and his students and colleagues were on the offensive to persuade the military of the usefulness of his technique to detect peripheral pathology (Bump 1996).…”

Section: L I N I Cmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Curt Richter: a life in the laboratory

2005

Choice Reviews Online

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The pictures of my two mentors hang in my office. One is Jean Mayer, my thesis sponsor. The other is Curt Richter, whom I did not meet until after my thesis was complete. But more and more, as the years pass, I realize that Curt Richter has been my model for how to do science, how to be an inquirer. I consider Curt Richter to have been the greatest psychobiologist of the twentieth century. He epitomized the approach of finding "big phenomena" (as my colleague, Philip Teitelbaum, describes them), that is, large, striking effects, which he then explored. Over and over again, he discovered something really important, brought it into the laboratory, tamed it with his ingenuity, amazing engineering ability, and great hands, and shed light on something interesting to us all. Richter's nose for phenomena was his greatest asset. His style was to open scientists' eyes to something we had not appreciated and give us some ideas about how to investigate it. Then, in most cases, he was on to something else. This breadth is apparent from the very beginning of his career. "His first seven papers deal with determinants of spontaneous activity, biological clocks, endocrine control of behavior, the origin of the electrical resistance of the skin, brain control of the motor system, and a device to aid in the measurement of salivation. All these beginnings developed into lifelong interests. . . . The breadth of this total entry into the scientific literature is so great, that none of his first seven papers refer to any of the others!" (Rozin 1976a). Richter is the quintessential example of what Jay Schulkin calls "a laboratory state of mind." As Eliot Stellar described Richter, "It is hard to imagine the joy of scientific investigation unless you've witnessed it directly. To see curiosity and humbleness go hand in hand, to see unabashed enthusiasm for new ideas, to see excitement over little achievements that inevitably add up to a big picture, to see that weather-eye out for the new shape of understanding, all this is to see Curt Richter" (Stellar 1976, p. xi).There is very little big theory in the Curt Richter corpus, and not much fancy equipment. His striking effects did not require, and usually did not receive, summary statistics, let alone inferential statistics. He just came up with one winner after another. He understood how to use natural pathologies, reproduced in the laboratory, to illuminate the normal state of affairs. He worked seamlessly across physiological and behavioral analyses, always with an idea of how what he studied was adaptive in an evolutionary sense.And he worked steadily, and really hard. His career was uninterrupted by moves of his lab from one place to another. Richter did his thesis under John Watson at Johns Hopkins University and stayed there for his whole life. It is hard to imagine anyone more associated with Johns Hopkins.Richter's major theoretical contribution was the idea of behavioral homeostasis, and he provided a massive amount of evidence for it. He brought ideas about constancy of the int...

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Section: L I N I Cmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: L I N I Cmentioning

confidence: 99%

Curt Richter: a life in the laboratory

2005

Choice Reviews Online

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“…2 The degree of skin resistance was used to record the order of magnitude of sweating and the changes that occurred. The instrument used was that advocated by Richter (7). The sensitivity of the indicating microammeter, or dermometer, was set at an appropriate level for each individual.…”

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confidence: 99%

Differential Spinal Block. Ii. The Reaction of Sudomotor and Vasomotor Fibers 1

Sarnoff¹,

Arrowood²

1947

J. Clin. Invest.

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In a previous communication (1), a technic was described for differentially blocking axones as they traverse the subarachnoid space. This was based upon the assumption that the smaller, unmyelinated fibers would be more susceptible to an anesthetic agent in the spinal fluid than the larger, myelinated fibers. At that time, we tested motor power and the patient's appreciation of pin-prick, touch, deep pressure, position sense, and vibratory sense. Skin temperature measurements were used as the index of vasomotor fiber block. It was found that when a 0.2 per cent solution of procaine hydrochloride was used, vasomotor fibers and pin-prick fibers were blocked while motor power and the modalities of touch, deep pressure, position sense, and vibratory sense remained unaffected.Emmett (2) presented a series of cases in which it was rarely possible to produce a sensory and sympathetic block without a motor block by giving a small volume of procaine solution in the usual high concentrations. Unfortunately, however, the various sensory modalities were not individually examined and the observations on the results of the block were confined to the feet.Gasser and Erlanger (3), working with cocaine, and Heinbecker, Bishop, and O'Leary (4), working with procaine, have demonstrated that the class C fibers, the least myelinated of a mixed nerve, are the first to be blocked when subjected to local infiltration with the anesthetic agent. It does not necessarily follow that these fibers (in which class autonomic fibers generally fall) are blocked by a lower concentration, but it does suggest that this is so and that, therefore, these fibers could be preferentially blocked.In this laboratory, preliminary experiments performed on the cat indicated that this was true. A powerful sympathogenic reflex, the carotid sinus 1 Presented at the Ether Day Centenary at the Massachusetts General Hospital on October 15, 1946. reflex, could be abolished in the vagotomized cat by a 0.15 per cent procaine perfusion of the spinal canal [after the method of CoTui (5)], at a time when the animal maintained spontaneous respiratory activity and gave a contralateral muscular response to the electrical excitation of one femoral nerve.The experiments of Judovich and Bates (6) are interesting in this connection. They demonstrated that varying the concentrations of ammonium chloride surrounding the saphenous nerve of the cat exerted a partially selective effect in obliterating the action potentials of the A and C type fibers. They did not clearly demonstrate that this was not a time gradient as in the work mentioned above. The selective effect of the pitcher plant distillate and ammonium salts, peripherally and intraspinally, in relieving neuralgic pain while leaving the usually tested sensations unimpaired is most stimulating; but the mechanism and fiber types involved are not clear.This report is concerned mainly with the selective effect, on the basis of a graded concentration, on sudomotor, vasomotor and pin-prick fibers in the subarachnoid space. MAT...

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Postoperative Sweating Patterns in Thoracolumbar Sympathectomy and Splanchnicectomy

Palumbo¹

1950

Arch NeurPsych

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SINCE the advent of thoracolumbar sympathectomy as a treatment for primary hypertensive vascular disease, various tests have been used postoperatively to determine the extent of the sympathetic resection. One of the tests commonly employed is the Minor starch-iodine test, which is based on the change in color occurring when a starch-iodine mixture becomes moist with the occurrence of sweating.The actual mechanism of sweating is not well understood. Best and Taylor 1 stated that the stimulus for sweat secretion is a rise in blood temperature, which has a twofold effect: the stimulation of nerve centers in the brain and the stimulation of heat receptors in the skin, which reflexly cause the secretion. This contention has been supported by other investigators.2 With these two concepts of the mechanism of sweating in mind, i. e., direct stimulation via the sympathetic nerve fibers from the heat centers in the brain and stimulation via a reflex arc from the heat receptors in the skin along sensory nerves to the central nervous system, the motor component being the sympathetic nerve fibers to the sweat glands, it is logical to assume that sweating will not take place from either form of stimulation if the sympathetic nerves to

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Thoracolumbar Sympathectomies Examined with the Electrical Skin Resistance Method

Cited by 20 publications

References 5 publications

Curt Richter: a life in the laboratory

Curt Richter: a life in the laboratory

Differential Spinal Block. Ii. The Reaction of Sudomotor and Vasomotor Fibers 1

Postoperative Sweating Patterns in Thoracolumbar Sympathectomy and Splanchnicectomy

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