Insanity tested by science, and shown to be a disease rarely connected with permanent organic lesion of the brain. And on that account far more susceptible of cure than has hitherto been supposed / [Charles Mountford Burnett].

  • Burnett, C. M. (Charles Mountford), 1807-1866
Date:
1848
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Insanity tested by science, and shown to be a disease rarely connected with permanent organic lesion of the brain. And on that account far more susceptible of cure than has hitherto been supposed / [Charles Mountford Burnett]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    The vital and mental principles are seated in the blood. The doctrine . of Harvey and Hunter. Mentioned in the Serip- tures 4000 years ago. 6 PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS. Fletcher and Broussais consider it only in the light of the vehicle of disease. We presume it can be no longer a matter of doubt that the vital and mental principles are contained in and conveyed through the blood. When we say the vital principle is contained in the blood, we must not be understood to mean that it has any existence there as an entity of matter. It is only the phenomena of life, the inherent vitality of living bodies that we can speak of, and this we do in the adjective sense, since it would imply an absurdity to speak substantively of that which as a nonentity cannot form part of any thing that is material. Strictly speaking, we ought therefore to say the vital principle there existing is the true cause of all the wonderful phenomena peculiar to life. This is an old opinion, but we cannot discover that a more reasonable or a more philosophical one has yet been propounded, and though it is not the most recent, yet it was held by the immortal Harvey, by Hoffman, Huxham, John Hunter, and a multitude of others, and it is the more satisfactory, seeing that, in the most mimute particulars, physiology has been enabled to prove what revelation had asserted nearly four thousand years before. We now know not only in general terms, as they are contained in the writings of Moses, that the “life of the fleshis the blood,” or in those of Solomon, that “‘out of the heart are the issues of life,” but, taking a more scientific view of the matter, and subjecting that fluid to almost every possible phy- siological test, we arrive at the conclusion, that not only is the blood in a general sense the recipient of the vital principle, but every individual red globule of its composition, after it has been aerated by the lungs, is, according to some physiologists, endowed with a sepa- rate vitality.