Medicine & the allied sciences : an address delivered before the Medical Society of King's College, London, on the 13th of October, 1870 / by E. Buchanan Baxter.

  • Baxter, E. Buchanan (Evan Buchanan), 1844-1885.
Date:
[1870?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Medicine & the allied sciences : an address delivered before the Medical Society of King's College, London, on the 13th of October, 1870 / by E. Buchanan Baxter. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    living tilings, and of the laws which regulate their activity. The word structure is here used in its most extensive sig¬ nification—a signification which is special to the matter in hand. It includes chemical as well as mechanical composi¬ tion, potential as well as actual organisation. The reason for this large, though not vague, employment of the term, resides in the fact that phenomena undoubtedly vital, are exhibited by matter which cannot be shewn to possess any organisation, so far as our present methods of investigation enable us to see. Organisation taken strictly, implies diffe¬ rentiation. And in the simplest forms of living matter,— in the Bathybius,—in the Amoeba,—or, to go lower still, in the monads and bacteria among whom the secret of the ori¬ gin of life still lies hid, no such differentiation can be made out. It follows immediately from the above definition that the phenomena with which biology is concerned, are of two kinds, or rather admit of being considered in two ways. The first is the inquiry into structure,—the structure of organ¬ isms as they happen to be at any given moment; the second, into function,—the operation of any organism as a whole, or of its organs taken separately. The first is the statical, the second the dynamical aspect of the science. The first embraces morphology (the study of form) and classification, which is now almost universally morphological, or founded on resemblances and differences of form. The second comprises physiology or the action of the organism upon its environ¬ ment, and the reaction, whether friendly or hostile, of the environment upon the organism; the latter branch of know¬ ledge having been much studied, but not as yet possessing a familiar name. By referring to this table (see table n) you will see how the specialities which have grown up one by one, according as expediency or accident dictated, without reference to any leading conception whatsoever, may be grouped under the great divisions I have enumerated. Those of them which form a part of the existing Medical Curriculum are printed in different type from the rest. They form no inconsider¬ able proportion of the whole. It is clear, that many phenomena are continually taking place in living beings, whether animal or vegetal, which are directly reducible to the laws of chemistry and physics,— the laws which regulate the existence of inanimate matter. The changes taking place in the air during respiration, the forces concerned in the propulsion of the blood through