Vascular accidents involving the spinal cord, in contrast to the brain, are extremely rare. Damage to the spinal cord from verified emboli seems to be an even greater rarity and no examples were found by Blackwood (1958) in a series of 3,737 postmortem reports from the National Hospital, Queen Square, London. Embolic myelomalacia has been reported in bacterial endocarditis and other forms of he...

by T.J.R. Francis, D.J. Smith and J.J. W. Sykes, Institute of Naval Medicine, Hampshire, England. The current means by which we classify decompression sickness dates back only 30 years to the experience gained during the construction of the Dartford Tunnel in London. Golding et al [1] proposed a system for decompression sickness based upon perceived severity of the cases which arose in the cais...