Excerpt from Washington Medical Annals, 1914, Vol. 13: Bimonthly Journal of the Medical Society of the District of Columbia Shock, as we understand it today, is essentially an excessive loss of the granular protoplasm of central nerve cells. An actual loss of the substance which constitutes the stored up energy of the nerve cells, just as lead salts constitute the stored energy of certain electric storage batteries. Part of this substance, which we call chromatin, because it stains readily with methylene blue, and some other stains, is normally oxidized and burned up with every discharge of nervous energy from the cell. It has long been known that a nerve cell Well stored with chrom atin granules will respond quickly and vigorously to slight stimuli, whereas a cell containing few chromatin granules responds more slowly and sluggishly, requires stronger stimuli to cause a dis charge or nerve impulse, and will fail to respond at all to any stimulus when the granules are exhausted. 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.