First principles of medicine / by Archibald Billing.

  • Billing, Archibald, 1791-1881.
Date:
1841
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: First principles of medicine / by Archibald Billing. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Woodruff Health Sciences Center Library at Emory University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Woodruff Health Sciences Center Library, Emory University.

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    secretions, we must look for some still uncompre- hended agency, which modifies the materials con- veyed by the arteries whilst they are depositing: even with respect to the deposition of bone, this agency is required to solidify the new particles which are fluid in the blood. This power can be no other than chemical : the processes, when ex- amined, will be found to be chemical precipitations, by which new matter is deposited, and decomposition, by which old matter is separated, and then carried off by absorbents; and thus the support of the frame in health, and the changes of disease, pro- ceed. In this investigation we may advance a considerable way, though we cannot come to the knowledge of the ultimate principle on which organic life depends, or we should be able to con- struct a man. As an instance how far we can go, we can analyse bone, and we may explain how bony matter is deposited from the blood by preci- pitation ; and we know that the shape depends on the periosteum, or membranous mould in which it is cast: but here we stop ; we cannot discover how, in the minute embryo in the womb, the membranes were first determined in their shapes; we here arrive at the confines of our knowledge; and must confess an infinitely wise First Cause, who does not permit us to know more than the phenomena by which we can judge how, in many instances, to avail ourselves of the means to regu- late the complicated apparatus which He has en- dowed with life. The deposition of bone is a combination of chemical precipitation and crystallisation, modified