Aids to pathology.

  • Campbell, Harry (Physician)
Date:
[1910]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Aids to pathology. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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

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    sists essentially of a nervous system from the ends of whose efferent nerve twigs so many muscle and gland cells depend, the whole being held together by connective tissue, and permeated by a complex system of channels for the circulation of the body-fluids, and that nerve stimuli are ceaselessly reverberating throughout the ner- vous system, we shall the better realize how potently that system must influence the individual cells of the body. Plasmic Influences.—These operate through the lymph bathing the cells, and depend upon the composition of that lymph, which, again, is essentially determined by the com- position of the blood plasma. This is a highly complex fluid —the most complex in nature, containing an endless variety of substances—food-stuffs, oxygen, hormones, ferments, opsonins — most of which defy the most careful and delicate methods of chemical research; and let the fact ever be remembered that it is in a fluid of this kind that, from the beginning to the end of its career, every cell in the body lies bathed, and is through it subjected to an endless variety of influences, both good and bad. Now, the cells of the body display little or no intrinsic tendency to disease : the cell environmeyit, notably the flasmic environment, is chiefly res;ponsihle for whatever disease may affect the cell. Even senile cell degeneration is largely extrinsic in nature, for though doubtless it is in part intrinsic—due to the running-down or wearing-out of the cell microcosm—it is even more the result of specific changes in the plasmic environment of the cell. Senility is, in fact, mainly of plasmic origin, the individual being slowly destroyed by means of his plasma—not, indeed, by any such simple and pathological process as that sug- gested by Metchnikoff—i.e., by the absorption of bacterial toxins from the large intestine—but by the operation of complex physiological mechanisms, the object of which is to put a definite term to the vital cycle, and thus to obviate the innate tendency to immortahty belonging to all living matter. In some animals—e.g., the dog—these mechanisms come into operation sooner than in others— e.g., man. Sometimes in man they come into prema- ture operation, the arteries becoming sclerosed, the skin