A treatise upon penetrating wounds of the chest / by Patrick Fraser.

  • Fraser, Patrick.
Date:
1859
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A treatise upon penetrating wounds of the chest / by Patrick Fraser. 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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    passed rapidly by the bronchial communications into the other lung, and fully inflated it. Experiment 7. On the morning of the 1st of February, 1858, a healthy dog was put into a properly adapted case, with a glass slide, and placed under the influence of puff-ball. A portion of the fifth right rib was then dissected out, sufficiently large to bring the lung into Tiew, having carefully avoided wounding it. The lung was then distinctly seen to contract upon inspira- tion, and to expand upon expiration. Various writers have offered explanations of this curious phenomenon. Dr. PI ales, in his Statical Essays, page 74, in writing upon this point, would lead us to infer that he considers this expansion of the lung to proceed, when there is an opening on one side only, from the force of the blood, in the pulmonary circulation, dilating the lung. Dr. Hoadley, in his Three Lectures on the Organs of Respiration, in 1737, when reasoning upon the experiments of Dr. Houston, explains the phe- nomenon as follows :— In expiration, the air in the unwounded side was condensed, and part of it, instead of going out at the windpipe, forced its way into the lung of the wounded side, and dilated it, till the air within it came into an equilibrium with the external air which surrounded it; and in inspiration, when the air in the lung of the un- wounded side became rarer than the external air, the lung in the wounded side was compressed, and