General pathology, as conducive to the establishment of rational principles for the diagnosis and treatment of disease : a course of lectures, delivered at St. Thomas's Hospital, during the summer session of 1850 / by John Simon.

  • Simon, John, Sir, 1816-1904.
Date:
1850
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: General pathology, as conducive to the establishment of rational principles for the diagnosis and treatment of disease : a course of lectures, delivered at St. Thomas's Hospital, during the summer session of 1850 / by John Simon. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    dwelling on this, let us at once ask, what evidence is there of this fermentation of the blood ? Surely a great chemist must attach definite signification to the word, and must mean to denote by it some total change of the properties of the fluid — not perhaps that it shall become beer, but that it shall become something very different from blood. Such total change has never been observed, nor anything approaching it. I know of no humoral changes characteristic of infective diseases beyond those I have already alluded to—changes, moreover, not chemically observed, but physio- logically inferred, and confined (so far as we know) within limits which are partial and specific for each particular disease. The peculiarities which Liebig appears to have completely overlooked, in his attempt to explain the operation of morbid poisons, are these: (1) that the agents in question are very various, affecting different ingredients of the blood severally and distinctively; (2) that their sphere of action in the blood is very partial, nowise extending, beyond the particular ingre- dients which they respectively affect, to an entire decomposi- tion or fermentation of the blood; (3) that the increase of the poison, coinciding with the decrease of the affected mate- rial in the blood, and consisting almost certainly in the con- version of that material, has not any true analogue in the fermentative process. The phenomena of infected diseases appear then, in many respects, to be sui generis. Certainly they are chemical. Probably they belong to that class of chemical actions called catalytic; where chemical combinations are modified by the presence of a body, which itself either remains unchanged, or at least does not enter into those new combinations deter- mined by its contact: as when, for instance, platinum deter- mines the union of oxygen and hydrogen, without any change of its own, or when oxalic acid occasions the decomposition of oxamide, or diastase the conversion of starch, or yeast the fermentation of sugar. Probably, I say, they may belong to this class of operations—a class already most heterogeneous; but in this class—if referred to it, they would unquestionably constitute a new species; for among the instances which I