Sensibility to Temperature

By Atom Bergstrom

Atom’s Blog

According to Adano Christopher Ley (Swami Nitty-Gritty) …

“The head is the base of the thermometer. The spinal fluid is the mercurial measurement. The dead man is cold. Everything runs back into the head at death. Pseudo or placebo death is in the solar plexus.”

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Phillip Bokiniec, et. al (“The neural circuits of thermal perception,” Current Opinion in Neurobiology,” Oct. 2018) wrote …

“The thermal system is capable of generating rapid and acute percepts that are uniquely identifiable yet bound together with tactile inputs during object manipulation. It can evoke both innate and learned motor behaviors as well as strong emotional reactions from pleasure to pain.”

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According to John Elliotson (The Zoist, Apr. 1848) …

“The employment of ether and chloroform is now making the medical profession acquainted with the phenomena of the mesmeric sleep-waking, and will inevitably lead them to devote all the attention we can desire to mesmerism. Among the other phenomena from ether and chloroform that are analogous to those of mesmerism, has occasionally been noticed sensibility to temperature when there was insensibility to mechanical injury. so that the surgeon’s cold hand has annoyed a cabinet minister, and a draught of cold air annoyed another patient, while the knife gave no pain. A mesmeric patient who gave no sign of pain under incisions, but shrunk from something cold accidentally touching him, would in England have been at once pronounced an imposter. In etherized patients the occurrence was considered striking, but begat no injurious suspicions. The fact of sensibility to temperature remaining not very rarely, after the loss of sensibility to cutting, pinching, &c., in paralysis, would not have remained unthought of to the present moment by nearly all medical men, had the pages of The Zoist been studied as they deserve to be, and will one day be, by the medical world, and the fact been learnt of artificial anæsthesia being often accompanied by a perfect feeling of temperature. Dr. Esdaile gives us no reason to suppose that he was aware of my observations, and the facts mentioned by him in regard to the impression of cold in the mesmeric sleep-waking have the greater force. Mesmerists have always known the effect of blowing upon or fanning mesmerized patients in dissipating sleep, and this takes place even though pinching their faces is not felt; and this was known to Dr. Esdaile. Nay, the continued contraction of a muscle, as when the jaw is obstinately closed, in mesmeric patients, is often at once removed by the application of a cold substance, though the patient be insensible of pain from mechanical causes.”

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