An inquiry into the origin of epidemics, and a physical and chemical analysis of their specific cause : on a new theory of matter and form / by J. Wishart.

  • Wishart, J., M.D.
Date:
[1848?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An inquiry into the origin of epidemics, and a physical and chemical analysis of their specific cause : on a new theory of matter and form / by J. Wishart. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    itecl analogies without identities in any of the different spe- cies. In Zoology, the human form seems to be the model or original form, varied, in the inferior animals, in vast di- versity of form, throughout the boundless field of animal existence ; and every variation or inflection of the original form accompanied by a corresponding diversity of quality. This endless variety of form, wonderful and magnificent though it be, is yet less astonishing than the fact, that from the bony skeleton and muscle to the most minute part—the hair, the fur, wool, cuticle, secretion and exhalation—the quality of all the parts are distinct from the same parts of all others. None of these parts, in man, are identical with the corresponding parts of any other animal, nor does any one of the inferior animals correspond, in any of their parts, with the same parts of any other species. The exhalations of each species, transcude from the general mass of the flu- ids and solids, composing the entire animal, and are made up of the essential form of the particles which give quality to every species of organized being. The same diversity in the form of the atoms is equally true, in vegetable physiology. The form of the cabbage is as different from that of tobacco, as the form of the par- ticles of the former are different from that of the latter, or the quahty of the one is from that of the other. The aggre- gate form composing the individual of a species, is the result of the form of the particles which stamps quahty upon it. But we must descend yet lower, and embrace, not only microscopic animals and vegetables, but also gases, miasms, effluvia and malarias, as well as ultra microscopic organiza- tions, and entities; a knowledge of the existence of which we have reached by experiment and induction. Micros- copic fungi are known to vegetate in certain cutaneous dis- eases of man, animalcuh are found within the coats of ve- getables, and swarm in water, in tight vessels. The spor- ules of these microscopic fungi, and the germs of the ani- malculi, although ascertained to be governed by the laws of animal and vegetable generation, are beyond the reach of any microscope ; nor can we, by this or any other test, detect malaria nor the fluigs in the blood vessels, or viscera of animalculi,and many other things which we know exist, and therefore infer their presence from their efl?ects. And from the circumstances and various phenomena under which epi- demics have arisen, progressed and declined, the laws which distmguish human from chemical miasms, have been deduc- ed. Gases are detected by chemical tests, but neither chem- ical tests, nor optical invention, have detected efl3uvia, va- pors, odors or perfumes ; and yet they each have a body and a form as distmct from each other, and as inconvertible into