The following work is an attempt to estimate the practical importance of cutaneous hyperalgesia in the diagnosis of visceral disease.
Ross1 published, in 1887, an article on the segmental distribution of sensory disorders. He first took up the distribution of the sensory nerves and showed that in man it is somewhat similar to that in the primitive vertebrates except for some disarrangement caused by the development of the limbs. In the primitive vertebrate each segment of the cord supplies an area of the body surface immediately over it and the viscera under this area. In man the relation of the viscera to the body surface has so changed that the somatic segment and the viscus supplied by the same cord segment are no longer one over the other. Pain, he said, might be splanchnic or somatic, splanchnic pain being vaguely felt over the region of the diseased organ causing it,