Hufeland's Art of prolonging life / edited by Erasmus Wilson.

  • Hufeland, Christoph Wilhelm, 1762-1836.
Date:
1859
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Hufeland's Art of prolonging life / edited by Erasmus Wilson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    The third important nourisher of life is air. We findi no being that can live entirely without air; and sudden;, sometimes instantaneous, death is to most of them the consequence of its being withdrawn. What makes its influence highly visible is, that those animals which breath^i are more abundant in the vital power, and possess it in: greater perfection, than those which do not breathe. :phlogisticated or empyreal air appears, principally, to be. that component part of our atmosphere which affords th^i strongest and best nourishment to the vital power: and ini •the present age, since the wonder-working art of chemistrj; has taught us to produce it pure, people, on inspiring it: have experienced a general sensation of strengthening an: ( invigoration. The grand principle of this emp3'real a i vital air is by chemists called oxygen; and this componen i part is that properly which in the air contains life, an( i passes into the blood by breathing. Water, also, belongs to the agents friendly to life, so far as it contains oxygen] and it certainly promotes life, for without fluidity no ex- pansion of life is possible. 1 I think I may with justice, therefore, assert, that light): heat, and oxygen, are the real proper nom-ishment ana. sustenance of the vital power. Grosser kinds of nourish- ment, setting aside the quantity of oxygen and empyreali matter which they contain, seem to serve rather for supJ' porting the organs and repairing the consumption. Wer^ not this the case, one could not explain how created beingr can maintain life so long without nourishment. Let U3. onl} consider the chicken in an egg. It lives without th^. smallest external support; expands itself, and becomes a. perfect animal. A hyacinth, or any other bulbous plant,*: can, without the least nourishment—except the evapora-'. tion of water—expand and shoot forth a stem crowneffli with beautiful leaves and flowers. Even among morfli perfect animals we observe phenomena which- would. otherwise be inexplicable. Dr. George Fordyce, for example, enclosed gold fish in vessels filled with welK- water; gave them at first fresh water eveiy twenty-four