Clinical researches on the therapeutic action of chloride of ammonium in the treatment of hepatic disease : with illustrative cases ... / by William Stewart.

  • Stewart William.
Date:
1879
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Clinical researches on the therapeutic action of chloride of ammonium in the treatment of hepatic disease : with illustrative cases ... / by William Stewart. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    movement of expiration, but to return, sucking in air with it, at each deep inspiration, so that the animal soon dies from the passage of air into the heart. ' In persons, then, who lead a sedentary hfe, this auxihary force for promoting the circulation of blood through the hver is diminished, blood stagnates in the gland, and the functions of the organ are deranged ; these results being all the more likely to arise if the hver be at the same time over-stimulated by errors in diet.'^ In persons resident in hot chmates, where the rarefaction of the air and a corresponding diminution in the supply of oxygen to the system favour certain functional derangements, and par- ticularly those relating to sanguification and disin- tegration of albumen, such results are rendered all the more certain. Prior to the publication of Dr. Murchison's classical and scientific Croonian Lectures our knowledge of the functional derangements of the hver was anything but satisfactory. Dr. Murchison has shown that there are grounds for suspecting that many symptoms, at first sight apparently referable to other organs, and even grave degenerations of tissue and organic disease, not only of the hver itself, but throughout the body, may be traced back to func- tional derangement of the hver, although some of these may as yet be imperfectly understood. It is now known that the liver is not only a blood- forming, but a blood-destroying or purifying organ, * Dr. Murchison's Lectures on Diseases of the Liver, 2nd edition,