Volume 1

General anatomy : applied to physiology and the practice of medicine / by X. Bichet ; translated from the last French edition by Constant Coffyn, revised and corrected by George Calvert.

  • Bichet, Xavier, 1771-1802.
Date:
1824
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: General anatomy : applied to physiology and the practice of medicine / by X. Bichet ; translated from the last French edition by Constant Coffyn, revised and corrected by George Calvert. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

    79/890 (page 39)
    abode in solids, we must not consider the fluids as purely inert. It is certain that those which are subservient to composition are gradually im- pregnated with a stronger and larger principle of life from the food, out of which they are formed, to the solids upwards. The alimentary mass is less animalized than the chyle, the chyle less than the blood, &c. It would undoubtedly be a very interesting subject of inquiry, to determine how particles hitherto devoid of vital properties, and absolutely enjoying only the physical, should impregnate themselves by degrees with the ru- diments of the former,—I say rudiments, for certainly the vital elaboration that fluids undergo in circulating as such in the body, and before they have entered the solids to form a part of them, is the first step to the properties of the latter. The solids would repel an inert fluid in- troduced into the vessels instead of blood, and designed for their nourishment; in like manner it would be useless to inject in that fluid the ma- terials of these already exhaled and secreted, insomuch as the exhaling and secretory organs would repel these materials, if they had not been previously prepared by assimilation. To say what that vitality of fluids is, is evi- dently impossible ; but its existence nevertheless is not less real, and the chemist who analyses fluids has but their caput mortuum as it were before him, as the anatomist possesses only