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I was also a slob, a knee-jerk rebel, and something of a nerd when it came to doing things like making friends with girls. Nonetheless, I decided that I could work out whatever I needed to work out in a healthier environment than at home; the countdown to the last day of high school, after which I planned to set out on my own, began when I was around fifteen.

No son of Paian he, but a fatherless, full-grown birth from the incessant matrix of Modern Time, so motherly of monstrous litters of "Gorgon and Hydra and Chimaeras dire"; you will understand what I mean when you consider the quite recent date of, say, the introduction of anaesthetics or antiseptics, the discovery of the knee-jerk, bacteriology, or even of such a doctrine as the circulation of the blood.

She would emit a stream of sounds in the trance state I can hardly call it speech, so murmurous, yet guttural, was the utterance, mixed with puffy breath-sounds at the languid lips. This state was accompanied by an intense contraction of the pupils, absence of the knee-jerk, considerable rigor, and a rapt and arrant expression.

Neumann investigated the knee-jerk in 500 women during pregnancy, labor, and the puerperium, and in a large number found that there was a progressive exaggeration with the advance of pregnancy, little or no change being observed in the early months; sometimes when no change was observed during pregnancy the knee-jerk still increased during labor, reaching its maximum at the moment of the expulsion of the foetus; the return to the normal condition took place gradually during the puerperium.

Experiment 131. To illustrate reflex action by what is called knee-jerk. Sit on a chair, and cross the right leg over the left one. With the tips of the fingers or the back of a book, strike the right ligamentum patellæ. The right leg will be raised and thrown forward with a jerk, owing to the contraction of the quadriceps muscles.

An appreciable time elapses between the striking of the tendon and the jerk. The presence or absence of the knee-jerk may be a most significant symptom to the physician. The Sympathetic System. Running along each side of the spine, from the base of the skull to the coccyx, is a chain of nerve knots, or ganglia.