A lecture on the physiology of digestion : introductory to a course of lectures on the Institutes of Medicine and Materia Medica : delivered before the medical class of the University of the City of New York, at the session of 1844-5 / by Martyn Paine.

  • Paine, Martyn, 1794-1877.
Date:
1844-5
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A lecture on the physiology of digestion : introductory to a course of lectures on the Institutes of Medicine and Materia Medica : delivered before the medical class of the University of the City of New York, at the session of 1844-5 / by Martyn Paine. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    * 3d. The stomach must have, within certain limits, the power of organizing and vitalizing the different alimentary substances. It is impossible, he says, to imagine that this organizing agency of the stomach can be chemical. The agency is vital, and its nature com- pletely unknown. Such, then, is the doctrine of digestion as entertained by the chemico- physiologists. But, from what we have already seen of the absolute contradictions which abound in the writings of those who attempt the application of pure chemistry to the functions and results of organic life, we may expect that the chemico-physiologist will be equally in- consistent when he applies himself, at one time, to the phenomena of living beings, and, at another, reasons from the results of the labora- tory to those phenomena. Accordingly, we find within a few pages of the foregoing doctrine of the chemico-physiologist, that he broadly affirms that there is no relation whatever between the mechanical ar- rangements and the chemical properties to which they administer. There is no reason why the chemical changes of organization should result from the mechanical arrangements by which they are accom- plished, neither is there the slightest reason, why the mechanical ar- rangements in the formation of organized beings should lead to the chemical changes of which they are the instruments. Here, then, in a single sentence, are not only the strangest contra- dictions, but a full admission that there is not ihe slightest reason for the application of chemistry to any process, function, or result of living beings. Nor is this all. For the chemico-physiologist, the same eminent chemist whom I have just quoted, goes on to say, that with the living, the animative properties of organic bodies, chemistry has not the small- est alliance; and probably will never, in any degree, elucidate those properties. The phenomena of life are not, he says, even remotely analogous to anything we know in chemistry as exhibited among inor- ganic agents. And, as if to complete the overthrow of the chemical part of the philosophy of digestion, the same reasoner observes that, The means by which the peculiarities of composition and structure are produced, which is so remarkable in all organic substances, like the results themselves, are quite peculiar, and bear little or no resem- blance to any artificial process of chemistry ; that nature will not per- mit the chemist to officiate as her journeyman in the most trifling de- gree. So, also, Dr. Roget, alike distinguished in the school of chemi- co-physiology. Vital chemistry, he says, is too subtle a power for human science to detect, or for human art to imitate. And to the same effect may be quoted Dr. Carpenter, one of the foremost in the school of pure chemistry. The agency of vitality, says this rea- soner, who generally ridicules the term and all that is supposed to re- late to it, the agency qf vitality he says, as Dr. Prout justly re- marks, does not change the properties of the elements, but simply com- bines the elements in modes which we cannot imitate. And thus might I go on with one after another, till I should have exhausted the whole that have attempted to confound the science of life with the science of chemistry, and show you by their own statements that there is not the slightest intelligible connection between them. Indeed, I have already, on a former occasion, pointed out this universal admission. 2