Vital motion as a mode of physical motion / by Charles Bland Radcliffe.

  • Radcliffe, Charles Bland, 1822-1889.
Date:
1876
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Vital motion as a mode of physical motion / by Charles Bland Radcliffe. 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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    Hoffman appeared on the scene that the notions handed down from the ancients began to be materially modified, and to take the forms belonging to modern times. With Paracelsus, Von Helmont held that the Archaeus and its underlings were the agents in all vital manifesta- tions, and he also thought for himself a little, for to him belongs the credit, if credit it be, of being the first to maintain that the living body had powers of a specific character altogether different from those belonging to inanimate nature. Accepting the doctrine that there was one law for animate and another for inanimate nature, Stahl went further, and maintained that matter is essentially and necessarily passive and inert, and that all its active properties or powers are derived from a specific and immaterial animating principle imparted to it—a prin- ciple to which he gave the name of aninia. The body, he heldj as body, has no power to move itself. All vital motion is the result of animation. The physical powers of matter, which have only free play after death, are in every way opposed to, and counteracted by, the animay of which he further says, as the followers of Hippocrates said of nature J that it does without teaching and without consideration what it ought to do;—a remark which makes it evident that the anima of Stahl is not to be confounded with the conscious personal Archaeus of Paracelsus and Von Helmont. What Stahl explained in this way, Hoffman, who took the next noticeable step in advance, explained on the hypothesis of nervous injluejice^ or nerve-fluid, whatever that may mean. By this influence or fluid, according to him, the moving fibres have a certain power of action, or tone, which may be increased or diminished. If increased unduly, spasm is the result: if decreased, atony.