Researches on magnetism, electricity, heat, light, crystallization, and chemical attraction : in their relations to the vital force / By Karl, Baron von Reichenbach. Tr. and ed. at the express desire of the author, with a preface, notes, and appendix, by William Gregory. With three plates and twenty-three wood-cuts. Parts I and II, including the second edition of the first part, cor. and improved.

  • Reichenbach, Karl, Freiherr von, 1788-1869.
Date:
1850
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Researches on magnetism, electricity, heat, light, crystallization, and chemical attraction : in their relations to the vital force / By Karl, Baron von Reichenbach. Tr. and ed. at the express desire of the author, with a preface, notes, and appendix, by William Gregory. With three plates and twenty-three wood-cuts. Parts I and II, including the second edition of the first part, cor. and improved. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    139/536 (page 85)
    IN THE HUMAN BODY. 55 with great obstacles, in spite of which it tends to force its way, when I connect like hands, that is, my right hand with her right hand, and so forth. This difference between the right and left hand can depend on no other cause than the known one of polarity, as we see it in the magnet, and have learned to recognise it in crystals. Thus regarded, the principal axis passes, in man, and probably in all animals, across the body, and the longitudinal axis must be regarded as secondary. In fact, we are only formed of two symmetrical halves in the transverse line.—Every part, the organs of the brain, the organs of sense, the apparatus of mastication, &c., the arms, hands, testicles, and feet ;—all these are transversely opposed in pairs, and thus we are, in general, transversely polar. 87. I examined these interesting relations at a subsequent period in Mlle. ATZMANNSDORFER, in the same way. The results were the same as those above described. She per- ceived, when I took hold of her hands with my opposite hands, (right with left, &c.) the current up her right arm and down the left, still more distinctly than Mlle. Marx. When I crossed my hands, hardly a minute elapsed be- fore she was so affected as to become sick. When I placed in her hand a rod of German silver, or a brass wire, and touched it with my right hand, she perceived, besides the usual feeling of warmth, a peculiar secondary sensation which I had also observed in Mile. STURMANN, namely, that these bodies appeared to become light, and, as it were, downy ; on the contrary, when I applied my left hand, they seemed to become heavy, and apparently much heavier than they natu- rally were. Without here entering into details on this pecu- liar sensation, I must mention it, as it furnishes another mark of the polar opposition between the right and left hand, ana- logous to attraction and repulsion. But in the same way as the patient recognised a difference between my two hands, she was able, no less clearly, to distinguish between her own. When I placed different bodies, such as iron pyrites, fluor spar, gypsum, reguline metals, or charcoal, in one of her hands, they excited sensations very different from those which they caused, when