SPINAL CORD COMPRESSION STUDIES

Abstract

IT IS HARDLY necessary to justify an experimental study in medicine aimed at providing more precise information under more controlled conditions than can be supplied by what Hughlings Jackson called "Nature's experiments." The purpose of accumulating such experimental, not to mention clinical, data is to enable one to foretell events in given circumstances. The ultimate end of this scientific approach is to understand the course of a disease process and to attempt to control it. Of course, the results of animal experiments are not always directly applicable to man because of anatomical, physiological, and biochemical differences among species. It remains true, nonetheless, that man has often been the beneficiary of critically evaluated experiments carried out on animals. In this investigation, by the use of techniques for producing gradual spinal compression described previously,⁶we have studied the recoverability of spinal cord function in dogs that, in varying lengths of time,