Within the last few years a large number of cases have been reported in medical literature in which various symptoms indicating disordered activity of the peripheral nerves in the course of infectious diseases have been observed.
Some years ago Ross and Bury, in their well-known essay on "Peripheral Neuritis," pointed out that the great majority of cases of paralysis which have been recorded as following typhoid fever were not due to cerebral or spinal lesions, but to changes in the peripheral nerves, and the studies which have been made of the nerve alterations which take place in diphtheria have also shown that in a certain proportion of cases the degenerative change exists in the peripheral nerves rather than in the central nervous system.
In this connection, it is interesting to note that that most frequent infectious disease, pulmonary tuberculosis is also capable of producing results similar to those to which