[On foul air and lung disease : a lecture] / by Arthur Ransome.

  • Ransome, Arthur.
Date:
[between 1870 and 1879?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: [On foul air and lung disease : a lecture] / by Arthur Ransome. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

    11/26 (page 49)
    remedied. No man can help spoiling the air he breathes, but owing to the bounteous provisions of nature, there are few who cannot get fresh supplies of tolerably good air to take its place. But let us see what changes air undergoes by being breathed. In every 100 parts of the air that we take into our lungs, there are, as we have seen, twenty-one parts of oxygen, but when it returns from the chest it contains only thirteen parts, the other eight parts have been removed from the air by the little blood corpuscles floating in the current of the blood rushing through the lungs. But expired air is not only deficient in oxygen, it contains a much larger quantity of the choke-damp, or poisonous carbonic acid than it did on entering; instead ot only three or four parts in 10,000, it now holds nearly 500 parts in 10,000. The oxygen previously inspired has met with a quantity of fuel in the tissues of the body and in the blood, has burnt it up, and has produced this large quantity of charcoal vapour. One pair of lungs pours out into the air in this way, in twenty- four hours, about as much carbonic acid gas as would be formed by burning eight ounces of pure charcoal, and at every breath a full-grown man thus alters rather more than a gallon every minute by his respiration, but he really spoils nearly one hundred times the quantity he breathes, for air that contains six parts of C02 in in the 10,000 has been found to be unfit for further breathing. And there is yet a third way in which breathing changes air. It becomes loaded with a larger quantity of watery vapour, and this vapour contains a certain amount of putrefying animal matter. If the vapour of the breath be condensed into a liquid, as may easily be done by exposing it to a cold temperature, it may be examined by chemical processes, or by the microscope. This I have frequently done, and have estimated the quantity and kind of organic matter given off, both in health and in disease. It would be sufficient, however, to prove to anyone the nature of this product of respiration, to keep it for a day or two in a warm place, and it soon gives off a putrid smell. It will also at once change the colour of a solution of perman- ganate of potash, the basis of Condy's fluid. The disagreeable odour of close air, which has been charged with impurities from the breath, is due to the accumulation of this exhalation. It is also the chief cause of the noxious nature of respired air, and will kill without any other ingredient being present. An American physician, Dr. Hammond, once kept a mouse under a bell-glass,