The indigestions, or, Diseases of the digestive organs functionally treated / by Thomas King Chambers.

Date:
1867
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The indigestions, or, Diseases of the digestive organs functionally treated / by Thomas King Chambers. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

    14/352 (page 2)
    practitioner the name has a distinct meaning, and is a definite guide to action. No symptomatic, anatomical, or even chemical considerations have prevailed over it, simply because it indicates a true method of classification, a natural linking of facts. The link drawing into one class the morbid phenomena which are the subject-matter of this volume is a partial defect in the necessary supply of that of which the body is built up, before it arrives at the medium of distribution. It is worth while to pause a little over this definition and on what it implies. The essence of digestion consists in absorp- tion from a canal communicating with the external air into a closed system of tubes where is contained the nutritive fluid. Preparatory to this absorption is solution, aided by nerves and muscles; and the end of it is assimilation, or the conversion of the substances received into a like nature with the fluid they float in. Till this has been done they cannot be used for the nutrition of the body. The blood is the floating capital lying between assimilation and nutrition—a treasury liable to continuous drafts from the latter, and requiring therefore constant supplies from the former to keep up its efliciency. Indigestion, then, or the incompleteness of digestion, is a defect anterior to constructive assimilation and to the blood, intervening between life and the new matter by which it seeks to renew itself. This explains the fact mentioned before and familiar to us all, of indigestion affecting more or less all the functions of the body, and producing such an almost infinite variety of morbid phenomena as immediate or remote consequences. It perverts incipient life at its very source, and therefore perverts all its future manifestations. It explains also why morbid anatomy here gives us less help than in any other classes of disease; why the degenerations of the viscera found in the dead body have less causal relation to the phenomena during life than in other cases. The changes seen by the morbid anatomist are those of solids exhibiting faulty processes essentially posterior to the blood, dependent on per- verted nutrition, or mal-directed or arrested destructive assimi- lation. Let my use of a negative word as a title be held to indicate my