Physiology of digestion and the digestive organs / by Arthur Gamgee.

  • Gamgee, Arthur, 1841-1909.
Date:
[1884?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Physiology of digestion and the digestive organs / by Arthur Gamgee. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    by contact with the body the water becomes heated, and if we determine the amount of water raised in temperature, and the amount of the increment of temperature, we obtain an estimate of the loss of heat sustained by the body. We may thus determine that the human body under observa- tion loses in 24 hours an amount of heat which corresponds to that required to raise, say 2839 kilogrammes of water one degree Cent., or, in other words, to raise about 62 pounds of water from freezing point to boiling point. If we appeal to the experience of the physician and to the experience of mankind, we are told, too, that this normal temperature of the animal body is a necessity for its continued existence, and that were the temperature of the body to be perma- nently lowered to any considerable degree, the functions which are most essentially vital, that is, most necessary to the continuance of life, cease, and death ensues. We now approach the question of the source wherein our store of matter and of energy in the body is continually replenished. Ex nihilo nihil fit: a body which continually loses substance and yet maintains its weight, and a body which, while continuously losing energy, yet retains its power of doing work, must depend upon the introduction of new matter and new energy from without. The substances lost are retrieved, as must be obvious to the simplest child, in the food which is eaten: it is equally true, although not so obvious, that the lost energy is recovered from the same source. In short, the substances which enter the body have not the same form as the substances which leave it: starch, albuminous matter, fatty matter, are introduced as food ; but carbonic dioxide, water urea, are the representatives of these substances in the excretions. Similarly the energy which enters the body is (with trifling exceptions) unlike that which escapes : in the former case it is potential, in the latter it is actual or kinetic. And these two concurrent series of events, viz. the transformation of matter on the one hand, and of energy on the other, are inseparably associated. Matters are introduced into the body in one chemical form and