This Article  • Full text PDF  • Reply to article  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in this journal  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

W. Kernig

Arch Neurol. 1969;21(2):216-217.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

For a number of years I have noted in cases of meningitis a sign that appears to be little known although its practical value is, in my opinion, not insignificant. I refer to the occurrence of flexion in the legs, and sometimes in the arms as well, when the patient sits up.

It is well known that the great majority of patients with tuberculous and epidemic cerebrospinal meningitis have the classical rather intense stiffness of the neck and back (although a few patients with acute meningitis have no muscle spasm at all, particularly with purulent secondary meningitis). As long as the patient is lying, there exists, in some of the cases, spasm of the extremities. In other cases—and these appear, in our observations up to now, to constitute the great majority—we find the recumbent patient to have stiffness of neck and back but no spasm in the extremities. . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Author Affiliations
Ordinator at Obuchow Hospital in St. Petersburg

Footnotes
Translation of: Ueber ein wenig bemerktes Meningitis-Symptom, Berliner Klinische Wochenschrift 21:829-832, 1884.

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?