TRANSLATED BY WALTER M. KRAUS, M.D., NEW YORK
As the histopathology of nervous affections becomes more precise, it becomes apparent that most processes of disintegration in the nervous system have no specific significance either as a whole or as to the cytologic elements which they include. It seems that, in the absence of a definite etiologic agent, the anatomic characteristics of a syndrome are brought about by the topography and evolutionary sequence of the lesions rather than by their histopathologic pictures.We discussed this recently1 in relation to the perivascular formulas occurring in the course of various phenomena of nervous system disintegration. Whatever is the origin of nerve destruction, whatever the cause—trophic, circulatory or infectious—the interstitial tissue of the nervous system reacts in an identical manner; the histopathologic picture thus produced is not pathognomonic of a given disease. In a work on disintegration of the nervous system,2 one