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Spinal   Listen
adjective
Spinal  adj.  
1.
(Anat.) Of, pertaining to, or in the region of, the backbone, or vertebral column; rachidian; vertebral.
2.
Of or pertaining to a spine or spines.
Spinal accessory nerves, the eleventh pair of cranial nerves in the higher vertebrates. They originate from the spinal cord and pass forward into the skull, from which they emerge in company with the pneumogastrics.
Spinal column, the backbone, or connected series or vertebrae which forms the axis of the vertebrate skeleton; the spine; rachis; vertebral column.
Spinal cord, the great nervous cord extending backward from the brain along the dorsal side of the spinal column of a vertebrate animal, and usually terminating in a threadlike appendage called the filum terminale; the spinal, or vertebral, marrow; the myelon. The nervous tissue consists of nerve fibers and nerve cells, the latter being confined to the so-called gray matter of the central portions of the cord, while the peripheral white matter is composed of nerve fibers only. The center of the cord is traversed by a slender canal connecting with the ventricles of the brain.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Spinal" Quotes from Famous Books



... ship that still was Nelson's. The captain of the Redoubtable saw through an alley of light, between walls of smoke, that the quarter-deck of the Victory had plenty of corpses, but scarcely a life upon it. Also he felt (from the comfort to his feet, and the increasing firmness of his spinal column) that the heavy British guns upon the lower decks had ceased to throb and thunder into his own poor ship. With a bound of high spirits he leaped to a pleasing conclusion, and shouted, "Forward, my brave sons; we will take the vessel of war ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore

... impoverished condition of the blood, which led to serous effusions within the ventricles of the brain, and around the brain and spinal cord, and into the pericardial and abdominal cavities, was gradually induced by the action of several causes, but chiefly by the character of ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy

... a third son was given to Mr. and Mrs. Gilmour, whom they named Alexander. In 1887 spinal trouble developed, and in December of that year he died. 'Though often ill,' wrote his father when announcing the death to the uncle after whom he had been named, 'his life was a happy one. It is now happier than ever. Thanks be to God that ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour

... defined as a tendency to act in a given way in response to a given stimulus. What happens when a stimulus prompts the organism to respond in a given way, is that some sensory nerve, whether of taste or touch or sound, sight, smell, or muscular sensitivity, receives a stimulus which passes through the spinal cord to a motor nerve through which some muscle is "innervated" and a response made. In the simplest type of reflex action, such as the winking of an eye in a blinding light, or the withdrawing of a hand from flame, such ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman

... was altogether against. Her mother was suffering from spinal complaint, it appeared, with very serious nervous complications, and there was no answering for the result of the smallest excitement. She never saw strangers, and, if it could possibly be avoided, ...
— The Red Triangle - Being Some Further Chronicles of Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison

... serious-minded bird down. Besides, I have to admit to myself that it's darn interesting watching the vim that "Rus" puts into this secret practice. Some nights it's mighty chilly and with the grass wet down it's enough to make your spinal column wriggle, but "Rus" never seems ...
— Interference and Other Football Stories • Harold M. Sherman

... young woman, plain and poor, a widow evidently from the style of her shabby mourning and sad expression of face, bearing in her arms a weird and sickly-looking child, evidently a sufferer from spinal disease—an infant as to size, ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield

... can be ascertained therefore, it appears that the young lady in question received a severe injury to the spinal cord, in consequence of which she became paralyzed in the lower extremities, in which members contractions also took place. It is probable also that the great sympathetic nerve and brain ...
— Fasting Girls - Their Physiology and Pathology • William Alexander Hammond

... Red Cross service. The most interesting part of the hygiene that penetrates into schools was that which diagnosed and described the "diseases of school children," that is to say, the maladies contracted solely as a result of study in school. The most prevalent of these maladies are spinal curvature and myopia. The first is caused by excessive sitting, and by the injurious position of the shoulders in writing. The second arises from the fact that in the spot where the child has to remain seated, there is not sufficient ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori

... lacks,—he Must see me, Cotopaxi!" "Ay! ay!" the fire-peak thunders, "And he must view my wonders! I'm but a lonely crater, Till I have him for spectator!" The mountain hearts are yearning, The lava-torches burning, The rivers bend to meet him, The forests bow to greet him, It thrills the spinal column Of fossil fishes solemn, And glaciers crawl the faster To the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various

... vict'ry. Jeff emerges like Diana from the bath an' frales the wamus off me with a club. Talk of puttin' a crimp in folks! Gents when Jeff's wrath is assuaged I'm all on one side like the leanin' tower of Pisa. Jeff actooally confers a skew-gee to my spinal column. ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis

... surroundings of some squalid home, where the parents toiled all day for worse than naught, just to satisfy their unhealthy cravings, while the children grew up riotous, half starved, and full of inherited vices. There was a little child I saw once, a cripple, dying slowly of some sad spinal disease, lying in a dark corner, on what seemed to me a heap of rags. Oh, God, I can see that child's face now! I remember when we heard of its death my mother burst into tears. They were tears of joy, she told me afterwards, that another suffering child's life was ended; 'and there are hundreds ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... Ruffer and Rietti. The majority of the lesions appear to have been the common osteo-arthritis, which involved not only the men, but many of the pet animals kept in the temples. In a much higher proportion apparently than in modern days, the spinal column was involved. It is interesting to note that the "determinative" of old age in hieroglyphic writing is the picture of a man afflicted with arthritis deformans. Evidences of tuberculosis, rickets and syphilis, according to these authors, have ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler

... he sent a merciful bullet crashing through brain and spinal cord. The hind legs threshed awhile, but presently, with a muscular quiver they stiffened and all was still. Yorke, releasing his hold struggled to his feet, and the two men stared pityingly at what lay before them. What those merciless, steel-shod hoofs had left ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall

... 18: Resembling the cone.—Ver. 106. In the Roman Circus for the chariot races, a low wall ran lengthways down the course, which, from its resemblance in position to the spinal bone, was called by the name of 'spina.' At each extremity of this 'spina,' there were placed upon a base, three large cones, or pyramids of wood, in shape very much like cypress trees, to which fact allusion is here made. They were called ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso

... such as the joints, where function changes. He says, "If we take highly decorated species—that is, animals marked by alternate dark or light bands or spots, such as the zebra, some deer, or the carnivora, we find, first, that the region of the spinal column is marked by a dark stripe; secondly, that the regions of the appendages, or limbs, are differently marked; thirdly, that the flanks are striped or spotted, along or between the regions of the lines of the ribs; fourthly, that the shoulder and hip regions are marked ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace

... lobster by inserting a sharp knife in its back between the body and tail shells cutting the spinal cord. Split the shell the entire length of the back, remove the stomach and intestinal canal, crack the large claws and lay the fish as flat as possible. Brush the meat with melted butter, season with salt and pepper, place in a broiler, and with the flesh side down, cover ...
— 365 Luncheon Dishes - A Luncheon Dish for Every Day in the Year • Anonymous

... that he had been told of a little girl who had to lie on her back for a year on account of some spinal trouble, and who had almost nothing to amuse her, so if anyone had scrap-books or toys and would send them to her it ...
— The Story of the Big Front Door • Mary Finley Leonard

... more neither the man nor the woman gave a sign of having heard him. The spring-cart's oscillatory motion seemed to have entered into their spinal joints; and now that they had come to a halt, their heads continued to wag forward and back as they contemplated the haze of smoke spread, like a blue scarf over the town, and the one long slate roof that rose from it as if to meet them. At length the old ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... three men's suits for his uniform, and he would always have to be the blank file in a column of fours, as four of his size would spread across the street, and to "cover off" the four behind them would just march in the rear of their spinal columns, having a ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett

... at sundown on the western coast of our island when the bay is hazy. The whole history of that century in both Am-ri-ka and Yoo-rup might well be written around the fact of transit, for transit was the spinal cord of the whole social, civil, and political order. Man-life then seemed to oscillate more rapidly than ever before, as if in sympathy with the vibration of ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various

... quite generally adopted, that the accumulation of sexual substance produces and maintains the sexual tension. The pressure of these products on the walls of their receptacles acts as an excitant on the spinal center, the state of which is then perceived by the higher centers which then produce in consciousness the familiar feeling of tension. If the excitation of erogenous zones increases the sexual tension, it can only be due to the fact that the erogenous zones are connected with these centers by previously ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud

... immediately to the cold menace of the gun-muzzle pressing against the top of his spinal column. He straightened sullenly. Racey, transferring the gun-muzzle to the small of McFluke's back, stooped swiftly, drew out McFluke's knife and tossed it through ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White

... the eye. Their most ordinary seat is the cellular membrane of the loins; where they exist for years, producing emaciation, and, at length, paralysis of the hind legs. This last the Calcutta author is represented as ascribing to the penetration of the spinal marrow; but he does not appear to have verified it by dissection. TREUTTLER says, he has seen the strongylus armatus in aneurisms of the mesenteric artery of the horse; but the writer in the Bulletin doubts whether any have ever ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various

... like his; that my place was aft with him, and with the Samurai, in the high place of government and command. I nearly wept with the chill of pride that was akin to awe and that tingled and bristled along my spinal column and in my brain. As for the rest—the weaklings and the rejected, and the dark-pigmented things, the half-castes, the mongrel-bloods, and the dregs of long-conquered races—how could they count? My ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London

... and the extremities. The head is divided into skull and face. The skull is constructed of eight bones, and to it are attached the teeth, two-and- thirty in number, and the hyoid bone, one. The trunk is divided into spinal column, breast and basin. The spinal column is made up of four-and-twenty bones, called vertebrae, the breast of the breastbone and the ribs, which are four-and-twenty in number, twelve on each side, and the basin of the hips, the sacrum and the coccyx. The extremities are divided into arms ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume IV • Anonymous

... before the excitement died away. Last summer, in the old Murcian town of Lorca, an English gentleman, who had been several weeks in the place, was attacked and nearly killed by a mob, who insisted that he was engaged in the business of stealing children, and using their spinal marrow for lubricating telegraph wires! What a picture of blind and savage ignorance is here presented! It reminds us of that sad and pitiful "blood-bath revolt" of Paris, where the wretched mob rose against the wretched tyrant Louis XV., accusing him ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay

... tell yet. He is perfectly insensible, and in all probability he will suffer from the concussion to the brain, and spinal ...
— A Life's Eclipse • George Manville Fenn

... been quite prostrate for months with some kind of spinal affection, complicated with chills and fever. In presenting himself for criticism, he was invited, as the subject generally is, to open his own case. He said he was under a spirit of depression and discouragement, particularly about his health. He thought he should ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff

... water on the brain), where there is an abnormal secretion of cerebro-spinal fluid acting to increase the pressure on the brain, the simple expedient of withdrawing the fluid by lumbar puncture brings about normal mental life. As the fluid again collects, the mental life becomes cloudy, and ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson

... plate of iron. The lance thrust which had slain the cayman was a chance—a sort of miracle. When the Indian struck with his mace upon the but-end of the pole, the iron pierced through the nape, into the vertebral column, and penetrated the spinal marrow, the only ...
— Adventures in the Philippine Islands • Paul P. de La Gironiere

... Scherer noticed that those who had been suffering very much from cold would die quickly when they had fallen to the frozen, ice-covered ground; the shaking due to the fall probably causing injury to the spinal cord, resulting in sudden general paralysis of the lower extremities, the bladder and the intestinal tract being affected to the extent of an involuntary voiding of ...
— Napoleon's Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 • Achilles Rose

... named in dear Germany of the Nomenclatures):—Katholisch-Hennersdorf is the place, and Tuesday about dusk the time. A sharp brush of fighting; not great in quantity, but laid in at the right moment, in the right place. Like the prick of a needle, duly sharp, into the spinal marrow of a gigantic object; totally ruinous to such object. Never, or rarely, in the Annals of War, was as much good got of so little fighting. You may, with labor and peril, plunge a hundred dirks into your boaconstrictor; ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... summer, half a foot deep upon the ground. The "fox-fire," rotting logs glowing with a faint luminosity, startled her several times, and the hooting-owl's shuddering bass—hoo! hoo! hoo-oo-ah-h! (like the awful keys of the organ which "touch the spinal cord of the universe")—sent all her blood to her heart. Under ordinary circumstances, she surely would not have started at the rustling made by the timid hare in the thicket near by. There was no reason why she should shiver so when a misstep caused her to scratch her face ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston

... and bizarre legend that mountain sheep rams jump off cliffs and alight upon their horns? I think not. People now know enough about anatomy, and the mental traits of wild sheep, to know that nothing of that kind ever occurred save by a dreadful accident, followed by the death of the sheep. No spinal column was ever made by Nature or developed by man that could endure without breaking a headforemost fall from the top of a cliff ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday

... the case of Mr. Barnard, one of the heads of the National Bank of Chicago, whose twelve-year-old daughter was suffering from spinal curvature. She grew worse, in spite of all the efforts of the most eminent doctors and surgeons, and it seemed that nothing could be done. The child must either die, or remained deformed for the ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot

... seems she was in the habit of taking some medicine to make her sleep, and it weakened her heart) asked me if I wouldn't like to take out some patients of his, and so I called for a very nice lady—a Mrs. Williams; you probably don't know her?—and after that a young girl with spinal trouble, and—and several others. They seemed to enjoy it, and I'm sure I did. Once I took a young girl that's staying here—she had a bad headache. She was a sweet girl, and I liked her. She said the drive helped ...
— Mrs. Dud's Sister • Josephine Daskam

... differentiating, the nervous rudiments sending out into the lymph filaments similar to nerve fibers. Since 1910 with the aid of Dr. Minot, I have succeeded in preserving alive the nerve cells of the spinal ganglia of adult dogs and rabbits by placing them in defibrinated blood of the same animal, through which there bubbled a current of oxygen. At zero and perhaps better at 15 deg.-20 deg., the structure of the cells and their colorable substance is preserved without ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor

... were filled with complaints of their heads, their backs, their lungs, their throats and their eyes. Garrison wrote at one time: "I hope to be present at the meeting but I can not foresee what will be my spinal condition at that time, and I could not think of appearing as a 'Garrisonian Abolitionist' without a backbone." Miss Anthony never lost a day or missed an engagement, although it may be imagined ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper

... between the physical and moral nature of man. The persistent priapism which oftentimes results from riding with a wet seat and the inordinate morbid sensibility of the sexual organs that may result from the same cause or from spinal irritation are not to be allayed by any homily on morality or on the sanctifying attempts at keeping the animal passions under subjection, any more than will prayers or offerings to all the gods of Olympus restore the eunuchized, either through foolish civilized ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino

... helping the Randalls settle. Harry 'phoned me early this morning and wanted to know if I didn't desire to be useful; said he would exchange compliments sometime." A significant pause, then a reminiscent sigh. "Every vertebra in my spinal column aches with an individual and ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge

... the slot, moved the tacks in single file to a spring-hammer close to the floor. This hammer was operated by a lever or tongue at the head of the handle, the connection between the hammer at the distal end and the lever at the proximal end being effected by means of a steel-wire spinal cord down the dorsal side of the handle. Over the fist of a hammer spread a jaw of sharp teeth to take hold of the carpet. The thing could not talk; but it could do almost anything else, so fearfully and wonderfully was ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp

... little room in which he kept his books was in that sort of trim that showed that he was the apple of their eyes. He was about six and thirty at present, and a little time before had married Miss Barrett. She had long been confined to a sofa by a spinal disease, and seemed destined to end there very speedily, but the ending was to be quite otherwise, as it proved. Browning made his way to her in a strange manner, and they fell mutually in love. She rose up from her sick-bed with ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb

... fearfully, and Reeder and Heinze gasped. General Laguerre had caught the words, and turned his eyes on me. Like the real princess who could feel the crumpled rose-leaf under a dozen mattresses, I can feel it in my bones when I am in the presence of a real soldier. My spinal column stiffens, and my fingers twitch to be at my visor. In spite of their borrowed titles, I had smelt out the civilian in Reeder and had detected the non-commissioned man in Heinze, and just as surely I recognized the ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis

... Trustee, "we have two cases of congenital hip disease and three of spinal tuberculosis—that is one of them in the second crib." Her eyes moved on from Sandy to Rosita. "And the fifth patient has such a dreadful case of rheumatism. Sad, isn't it, in so young a child? Yes, the Senior Surgeon says ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer

... which, at that time, were plentiful in the coast sections of the more southern of the slave-holding States. They were called "racers" because of their long legs, slender bodies, and great capacity for running; and "Razor Backs" on account of the prominence of the spinal column. The origin of this particular species of the porcine tribe is unknown, but there is a tradition to the effect that their progenitors were a part of the drove that came to the coast of Florida with De ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten

... as composed of three systems, arranged in the form of a hierarchy, the higher including the lower, and yet each having a certain degree of independence. The first level represents the type of simplest reflex and involuntary movement and is localized in the gray matter of the spinal cord, medulla, and pons. The second, or middle level, comprises those structures which receive sensory impulses from the cells of the lowest level instead of directly from the periphery or the non-nervous tissues. The motor ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall

... exclaim—"Change your position, my lord! I see a rascal taking aim at you!" when the fatal bullet unhappily smote the hero; and, having entered near the top of his left shoulder, penetrated through his lungs, carrying with it part of the adhering epaulette, and lodged in the spinal marrow of his back. A shout of horrid joy, from the enemy, seemed to announce their sense of the cruel success. His lordship was prevented from falling, by Captain Hardy; to whom he said, with a smile—"They have done for me, ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. II (of 2) • James Harrison

... face and brush all that fluff off your jacket. Then pluck up, and like a man go in to the captain; keep cool—you'll be cooler by that time—and tell him exactly how it all was; say you are sorry, and—Don't keep on shaking your head like that, sir; you'll be doing some injury to your spinal column." ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn

... of having that limb faded away entirely. I think we may to some extent explain this. The knowledge we possess of any part is made up of the numberless impressions from without which affect its sensitive surfaces, and which are transmitted through its nerves to the spinal nerve-cells, and through them, again, to the brain. We are thus kept endlessly informed as to the existence of parts, because the impressions which reach the brain are, by a law of our being, referred by us to the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various

... man complained seemed to encircle his waist, wherefore the strange physician, having untied his patient's arms from behind, and retied them in front, began his measurements again, this time from the spinal column. ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor

... yet! They haven't got the memory of the eye and ear, and without that no speck of spinal marrow will avail; they must be content ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al

... Ben, and was frankly disappointed to find that Ben was not dead—far from it: he gave a deep groan when Lawrence rolled him over: but it was a case of broken arm and collarbone, if not of spinal injury as well. Lawrence found a length of line in the yard—Clara's clothes-line, in fact—and knotted it into a triple cord, for, though no sane man could have got far in such a state, it was on the cards that Janaway in his madness might scramble up and wander away ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde

... After that, they never let it alone. They kept rubbing it into me all the time that I was different. As my father put it, I wore my cerebro-spinal system on the outside, and I had to grow a skin or two if I wanted to be a man and not an anatomical diagram. I'd got to prove that I was a man—that I ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair

... the National Hotel, but last year Mr. Arnold bought a vacant lot on our street, and has built a large double house with a ballroom, if you please. I believe Mrs. Arnold is to give her house-warming some time soon. It was she who made the original remark about having a 'spinal staircase in the back,' and Doctor Boyd told her it was quite the proper ...
— The Lost Despatch • Natalie Sumner Lincoln

... flowers, and birds of tender tint; very straight and tight in front, and adorned behind, along the spine, with large, strange, iridescent buttons. The revival of taste, of the sense of beauty, in England, interests me deeply; what is there in a simple row of spinal buttons to make one dream—to donnor a rever, as they say here? I think that a great aesthetic renascence is at hand, and that a great light will be kindled in England, for all the world to see. There are spirits there that I should like ...
— A Bundle of Letters • Henry James

... but I can think of no neurological injury which would produce the type of paralysis which he describes except a high lesion of the spinal cord. What is more, within a few moments he is in the saddle of a galloping horse and I cannot imagine that anyone suffering from a form of paralysis could ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot

... Street had nothing to offer a creature of Anne Fletcher's kind. It had everything to take, and it seemed bent on taking everything. It was bad enough in the beginning, when she had given herself up, body and soul, to the spinal lady; but to go and marry the brother, without first disposing of the spinal lady in a comfortable home for spines, why, what must the man be like who could ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair

... trowel, the mass is divided and subdivided into smaller and smaller portions, until it is reduced to an aggregation of granules not too large to build withal the finest fabrics of the nascent organism. And, then, it is as if a delicate finger traced out the line to be occupied by the spinal column, and moulded the contour of the body; pinching up the head at one end, the tail at the other, and fashioning flank and limb into due salamanderine proportions, in so artistic a way that, after watching the process hour ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka

... it has received. What has been said about the different nervous centres of the body demonstrates the existence of a memory in the nerve cells diffused through the heart and intestines; in those of the spinal cord, in the cells of the motor ganglia, and in the cells of the cortical ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler

... posters appeared in due course, and the public were informed, in all the colours of the rainbow, and in letters afflicted with every possible variation of spinal deformity, how that Mr Johnson would have the honour of making his last appearance that evening, and how that an early application for places was requested, in consequence of the extraordinary overflow attendant on his performances,—it being a remarkable ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens

... Hunt's "Light of the World," a gift from the artist himself, who formerly lived in a house on this site and in it painted the original. The ages at which patients are received are between three and ten, and the cases are frequently paralysis, spinal or hip disease. ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton

... nowhere to be seen practised more naturally and happily than in his Reisebilder. In 1847 his health, which till then had always been perfectly good, gave way. He had a kind of paralytic stroke. His malady proved to be a softening of the spinal marrow: it was incurable; it made rapid progress. In May 1848, not a year after his first attack, he went out of doors for the last time; but his disease took more than eight years to kill him. For nearly eight years he lay helpless on a couch, with the use of his limbs gone, ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold

... say the daring things which he took delight in uttering. He was very near-sighted, and appeared, notwithstanding his eye-glass, never to see anyone; and when he sat down his whole frame seemed to accommodate itself to the shape of the chair. His figure seemed to shrink into folds, as if his spinal column were made of rubber; his legs, crossed one over the other, looked like two rolled ribbons, and his long arms, resting on the arms of the chair, allowed to droop his pale hands with interminable fingers. His hair and moustache, ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant

... confused and arid expositions of official professors. Now I led my auditors into the inmost laboratories of Nature, and revealed, in plant and animal, the fine affinities that regulated her processes of nutrition. Now I traced some delicate nervous filament from the spinal column of the amphioxus to the cerebral hemisphere of the mammifer. Now I disclosed the ramifying canals in the vast system of circulation, mounting from the spongy network of the mollusk and the sluggish lymphatic of the reptile to the brilliant, bounding arteries of the ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various

... his death, had lost all his faculties, in consequence of a softening of the spinal marrow. Every means was resorted to for reviving a spark of that intellect once so vigorous; but all failed. In a single instance only he exhibited a gleam of intelligence; and that was on hearing one of his friends play the septette ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various

... adopted abroad, and volumes have been devoted to it. Neurasthenia has been divided into cerebral, spinal, and otherwise, according as the fears and sensations of the patient are referred to one or another part of his body. While the term neurasthenia is becoming daily more familiar to the general public, it is being, on the whole, ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.

... a delicate straight line appearing on the surface of the growing layer of cells is the base of the embryonic spinal column. Around this the whole embryo develops in an intricate process of cell division and duplication. One end of the Primitive Trace becomes the head, the other the tail, for every human being has a tail at this ...
— Sex - Avoided subjects Discussed in Plain English • Henry Stanton

... dying or thinking of dying. "Babiche" in the North is the tie that binds, and "sinew" is the thread, babiche being merely cured rawhide from moose or caribou, the sinew the longitudinal strands taken from either side of the spinal column of the ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron

... muscles is also a material fact, a material influx which starts from the motor cells of the encephalon, and of which we know the course down through the pyramidal fascium, the anterior roots of the spinal cord, and the nerves of the periphery to its termination in the motor plates of the muscles. It is this excitement which is the physical, direct, and veritable cause of voluntary movements. And it is the same with all acts and signs, all expressions of our conscious states; the trembling of ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet

... path to tread Between the barn and house, and brave The March rain and the winds that rave. ... O, landscape I am one who stands Returned with pale and broken hands Glad for the day that I have known, And finds the deserted doorway strown With shoulder blade and spinal bone. And you who nourished me and bred I find the spirit from you fled. You gave me dreams,'twas at your breast My soul's beginning rose and pressed My steps afar at last and shaped A world elusive, ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters

... taking it off and putting it on again with anything like dignity. At any rate, then, here goes a how. But, another difficulty presented itself; my loose frock was so voluminous that I doubted whether any spinal curvature would ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville

... the spine, from the mane to the tail; but this is so common that I need enter into no particulars. (2/33. Some details are given in 'The Farrier' 1828 pages 452, 455. One of the smallest ponies I ever saw, of the colour of a mouse, had a conspicuous spinal stripe. A small Indian chestnut pony had the same stripe, as had a remarkably heavy chestnut cart-horse. Race-horses often have the spinal stripe.) Occasionally horses are transversely barred on the legs, chiefly on the under side; and more rarely they have a distinct stripe on the shoulder, ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin

... includes two systems of organs: those which maintain the body in its integrity, and which he shares in some sort with the lower animals,—the organs of digestion, circulation, respiration, and reproduction; and that higher system of organs, the brain, spinal marrow, and nerves, with the organs of sense, on which all the manifestations of the intelligent faculties depend, and by which his relations to the external world are established and controlled: the whole being surrounded by flesh, muscles, and skin. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various

... without mercy. First we convoyed Mrs. Madehurst and the blind woman to wait by the sick bed till the nurse should come. Next we invaded a neat county town for prescriptions (the Doctor said the trouble was cerebro-spinal meningitis), and when the County Institute, banked and flanked with scared market cattle, reported itself out of nurses for the moment we literally flung ourselves loose upon the county. We conferred with the ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling

... is the art of systematic training of the muscular system. The action of the voluntary muscles, which are regulated by the nerves of the brain, in distinction from the involuntary automatic muscles depending on the spinal cord, while they are the means of man's intercourse with the external world, at the same time re-act upon the automatic muscles in digestion and sensation. Since the movement of the muscular fibres consists in the change of contraction and expansion, it follows that Gymnastics ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz

... meant a speedy end for him; his claws dug deeper through the tough hide and his jaws drew together with the slow, irresistible force of a vise. At last it came, a dull, faint report. The great reptile's head fell forward and the body lashed frantically; the spinal column had been severed and that marked the beginning of ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller

... purpose used all peaceable endeavours, the collected part of the semen, raised and inflamed, became adust, converted to choler, turned head upon the spinal duct, and ascended to the brain. The very same principle that influences a bully to break the windows of a woman who has jilted him naturally stirs up a great prince to raise mighty armies and dream of nothing but ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift

... that it must be absolute. I hope society in Ireland will be organized that the idea of democratic control of its economic life will so pervade Irish thought that it will be in the body politic what the spinal column is to the body—the pillar on which it rests, the strongest single factor in the body. Another illustration may make still clearer my meaning. In a red sunsetting the glow is so powerful that green hills, white houses, ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell

... shells. In addition to the respirators in case of a possible gas attack, supplied by that staff officer with a twinkle in his eye, we needed a steel rod fastened to the back of our necks and running down our spinal columns in ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer

... said, in a high voice. "I held my tongue for the livin', but I'm goin' to speak for the dead. My poor husband died twenty years ago, got his hand cut in a machine in Lloyd's, and had lockjaw, and I was left with my daughter that had spinal disease, and my little boy that died, and my own health none too good, and—and he—he—came to my house, one night after the funeral, and—and told me he was goin' to look out for me, and he has, he has. That blessed man gave ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... that in a short time he deprived her of one of her fore paws by a lucky stroke, and completely disabled her, eventually, by a desperate cut across the neck, which divided the tendons and severed the spinal vertebrae. Having completed his conquest, he had ample time to dispatch ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman

... Many men scoff at a chair as a cumbersome luxury. But after a hard day on foot or in the saddle, when you sit on the ground with your back to a rock and your hands locked across your knees to keep yourself from sliding, or on a box with no rest for your spinal column, you begin to think a chair is not a luxury, but a necessity. During the Cuban campaign, for a time I was a member of General Sumner's mess. The general owned a folding chair, and whenever his back was turned every one would make a rush to get into it. One time we were discussing ...
— Notes of a War Correspondent • Richard Harding Davis

... door, and then the beast stretched himself slowly out across my legs, and shivered, and died. That man opposite to you had leapt his horse over us both, and, while he was in the air, speared the boar through the spinal marrow. If he had been struck any where else he might still have torn me badly before the life was out of him. Neatly ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence

... semi-transparent shell you could have seen, if you had examined it closely, a pair of bright, beady eyes, and a dark little thread of a backbone that was always curled up like a horseshoe because there wasn't room for it to lie straight. But along the outside of the curve of each spinal column a set of the tiniest and daintiest muscles was getting ready for a long pull, and a strong pull, and a pull all together. And one day, late in the winter, when the woods were just beginning to think about spring, ...
— Forest Neighbors - Life Stories of Wild Animals • William Davenport Hulbert

... instances it may be necessary (e. g., experimental inoculation of rabies) to examine the cranial cavity or to remove the spinal cord. Return the viscera to the abdominal cavity; draw the flaps of skin together and secure with Michel's steel clips. Draw the copper nails securing the limbs to the board, reverse the animal and again nail the limbs down—the body now being ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre

... right of the spinal column, I cut a huge demilune out of his new spring overcoat, bringing it round as far under his left side (which was the right side of the navvy) as I dared. Passing thence swiftly to the back of the seat, and reaching between the splines, I sawed through the silk-faced front on the left-hand ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling

... father was with him. He had been bitten in the face, and was taking the treatment. I said to Pasteur, 'Will he live?' 'No,' said he, 'the boy will be dead in six days. He was bitten too near the top of the spinal ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin

... the top of the head instead of in the front, which is here modified to form a sucker. But the gills, by which this little creature breathes, expel the water by which they are bathed through a single hole at the side of the head, as in the frog tadpole; while in the possession of a brain, a spinal cord, and a soft backbone, both ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various

... ideal rider, man wants but little here below, nor is it at all likely he will want that little long. He wants—or rather, needs— a skull of best spring steel; a spinal column of standard Lowmoor; limbs of gutta-percha; a hide of vulcanised india-rubber; and the less brains he has, the better. Figuratively speaking, he should have no brains at all; his thinking faculties ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy

... be central &c. adj.; converge &c. 290. render central, centralize, concentrate; bring to a focus. Adj. central, centrical[obs3]; middle &c. 68; azygous, axial, focal, umbilical, concentric; middlemost; rachidian[obs3]; spinal, vertebral. Adv. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget

... sole activity of the spinal cord does not suffice for reflexes, since if it did, those would occur even when the brain is otherwise profoundly engaged. As they do not so occur the brain also must be in play. Now this distinction is not indifferent ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden

... the mid-line of the abdomen with its upper margin somewhat above the navel. With one hand, or with both if necessary, the mass is grasped in such a way that the fingers cover the top of it and pass backward toward the spinal column; the thumb remains in contact with the front of the organ. The womb is stroked and squeezed much as one kneads dough, and for this reason the procedure is technically called kneading. Such manipulations cause ...
— The Prospective Mother - A Handbook for Women During Pregnancy • J. Morris Slemons

... or narrow neck before mentioned, when the enemy opened fire and killed a soldier near my side by a shot which, just grazing the bridge of my nose, struck him in the neck, opening an artery and breaking the spinal cord. He died instantly. The Indians at once made a rush for the body, but my men in the rear, coming quickly to the rescue, drove them back; and Captain Doll's gun being now brought into play, many solid shot were thrown into the jungle where they lay concealed, ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. I., Part 1 • Philip H. Sheridan

... doubtful case, every fact open to more than one interpretation, has been eliminated, there remains hardly a single unquestionable example of acquired and transmitted peculiarities, beyond the famous experiments of Brown-Sequard, repeated and confirmed by other physiologists.[41] By cutting the spinal cord or the sciatic nerve of guinea-pigs, Brown-Sequard brought about an epileptic state which was transmitted to the descendants. Lesions of the same sciatic nerve, of the restiform body, etc., provoked various troubles in the guinea-pig which ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson

... gate to hail the doctor, who was as sure to pass as the passenger-train. It was a familiar joke in Clayton that the buggy had a regular track, and that the wheels always ran in the same rut. Once, when Carter Nelson had taken too much egg-nog and his aunt thought he had spinal meningitis, the usual route had been reversed, and again when the blacksmith's triplets were born. But these were especial occasions. It was a matter for investigation when the doctor's buggy went ...
— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice

... and opinions after examination. These opinions can be seen in full in nearly any large medical library. At this time they had diseased and atheromatous arteries, and Chang, who was quite intemperate, had marked spinal curvature, and shortly afterward became hemiplegic. They were both partially blind in their two anterior eyes, possibly from looking outward and obliquely. The point of junction was about the sterno-siphoid angle, a cartilaginous band extending from sternum to sternum. In 1869 Simpson ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... wishes to perform an operation and therefore render the patient unconscious, he presses the tough cartilagenous part of a section of the backbone with a screw device fastened to the body of the patient. This simple act renders the spinal cord insensitive, which condition may be maintained for hours without injuring the patient. Of course any point above the screw device is sensitive, and for this reason it is more difficult to render a person unconscious in the ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris

... passed round the rear of his load to the nigh side of his team. I caught only a few of his last words;—"take your backbone for a for'ard X." I snapped my thumb and finger at him, though not lifting my arm from my side. The human spinal column, with its vertebrae, for an axle-tree of a wagon! And yet, I immediately thought, the poor negro's back is truly "the for'ard X" of the great wagon of our American commerce. ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams

... consoled Helen, "how much more awful it would have been if you had swallowed him, Heavy, instead of his wriggling down your spinal column." ...
— Ruth Fielding Down East - Or, The Hermit of Beach Plum Point • Alice B. Emerson

... encountered such a case. It is all due to the irritation of the spinal nerves, and until we can get rid of the cause we cannot ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn

... I was when first I saw the actual cautery applied in a case of spinal disease. The white hot iron was pressed firmly into the patient's back, without the use of any anaesthetic, and what with the sight and the nauseating smell of burned flesh I felt faint and ill. Yet, to my astonishment, the ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro

... system which would naturally be supposed to have to do with such functional peculiarities as the dancer exhibits. So far as I have been able to learn, no investigator has carefully examined the brain and spinal cord in comparison with those of the common mouse, and only those who have failed to find any structural basis for the facts of behavior in the organs of the ear have attempted to account for the dancer's whirling and deafness by assuming that the cerebellum ...
— The Dancing Mouse - A Study in Animal Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes

... by the discovery of his fault. Instead of being hurt, denying, defending himself, begging forgiveness, instead of remaining indifferent even—anything would have been better than what he did do—his face utterly involuntarily (reflex spinal action, reflected Stepan Arkadyevitch, who was fond of physiology)—utterly involuntarily assumed its habitual, good-humored, ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy

... hydrocephalus, vomiting, constipation, etc., have lasted for some time, the abdomen gradually decreases in size, becomes wrinkled and collapses until it finally assumes a scaphoid shape and by slight pressure the large iliac artery can be felt on the spinal column. ...
— Prof. Koch's Method to Cure Tuberculosis Popularly Treated • Max Birnbaum

... found that the nervous system has a certain up-and-down arrangement from the segments of the spinal cord up to the gray matter of the rind or "cortex" of the large masses or hemispheres in the skull, to which the word brain is popularly applied. This up-and-down arrangement shows three so-called "levels" of function. Beginning with the spinal cord, we find the ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin

... that struck the battle-field, and when those four currents of wind met, the bones began to rattle; and the foot came to the ankle, and the hand came to the wrist, and the jaws clashed together, and the spinal column gathered up the ganglions and the nervous fiber, and all the valley wriggled and writhed, and throbbed, and rocked, and rose up. There, a man coming to life. There, a hundred men. There, a thousand; and all falling ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage

... relief is obtained from the application of the douche (first hot and then reduced to tepid or cold, according to the nature of the case) in subacute rheumatic arthritis, long-standing sciatica, facial neuralgia or tic douloureux, intermittent headache, spinal irritation, chorea or St. Vitus' dance, wrist drop (from lead poison), writers' cramp, where there is the rheumatic diathesis, and paralysis ...
— Buxton and its Medicinal Waters • Robert Ottiwell Gifford-Bennet

... upon so easy an explanation, by proving that the same reaction could be elicited even after all the nerve connections between the gut and the spinal cord were severed. If the relation was a reflex, it would have to be classed now as one of those local nerve circuits, which are pretty common among the viscera, a local call and reply as it were, without mediation of the great long distance trunk ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.

... subsidiary eddies. There was a decentralizing movement toward the rugs and cushions on the steps, or to the seclusion of seats skilfully embowered amid groups of palms. Dowagers sought the rose-colored settees against the walls. Gentlemen, clasping their white-gloved hands at the base of their spinal columns, bent in graceful conversational postures. A few pairs of attractive young people continued to pace the floor. Claude remained where he was. He remained where he was partly because he hadn't decided what else to do, and partly because his quick eye had singled out the one girl in the ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King

... mass of nervous substance which is found located in the human brain in a position near the middle of the skull, almost directly above the extreme top of the spinal column. It is shaped like a small cone, and is of a reddish-gray color. It lies in front of the cerebellum, and is attached to the third ventricle of the brain. It contains a small quantity of peculiar particles of a ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita

... alien lay unmoving with its head in a sticky puddle, but Longtree took no notice. He didn't even consider that after the Festival he would never be able to play his symphony again in all its glorious completeness. His spinal column tingled pleasantly, and his skin turned the golden yellow ...
— I Like Martian Music • Charles E. Fritch

... confident and virile. His attitude towards Ludvig David in his early youth had been somewhat that of a protector. Unfortunately he was seriously wounded during the first storming of the Dybboel redoubts by the Germans; a bullet crushed one of the spinal vertebrae; gradually the wound brought on consumption of the lungs ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes

... frequent victims as examples to enforce the rigid discipline. The punishment by the garrote is a common resort. It is a machine contrived to choke the victim to death without suspending him in the air. At the same time it is fatal in another way, namely, by severing the spinal column just below its connection with the brain. The condemned man is placed upon a chair fixed on a platform, leaning his head and neck back into a sort of iron yoke or frame prepared to receive it. Here an iron collar is clasped about the throat. At the appointed moment a screw is suddenly turned ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou



Words linked to "Spinal" :   spinal curvature, spinal column, spinal fusion, spinal nerve, spinal cord, saddle block anaesthesia, spinal anesthetic, herediatry spinal ataxia, spinal tap, spinal anaesthetic



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