Comments on convulsive diseases / by Charles Bland Radcliffe.

  • Radcliffe, Charles Bland, 1822-1889.
Date:
1851
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Comments on convulsive diseases / by Charles Bland Radcliffe. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    for it is short and light after the accumulated exhaustion of a long summer day, and profound and continued in winter, when the length of the day and the degree of weariness are reduced to the lowest limit. In other words, the times allotted to renewal and waste are inversely related to each other, or nearly so; and hence it is difficult to suppose that either of these processes is the sole cause or effect of the other. And if the efficient agents for which we seek are not to be found in the animal itself, where are we to turn? Are we to look for them in those grand changes which take place in the heavenly bodies, and which affect the whole creation at one and the same time? That we are, is perhaps to be argued from those changes in the economy which evidently refer to this source for their cause. An ordinary plant, for example, becomes bare and dead at the end of summer and remains in this state until spring; and that it is the returning light and warmth which bring back the life, is evident in the fact, that the same plant con- tinues to flourish throughout the year in a more genial climate. A common squirrel becomes torpid and motionless when the country is wrapped in snow and ice, but in winterless regions the capacity of active existence is never lost. As we pass from southern to northern latitudes, we further find, that animal and vegetable life becomes less energetic in exact relation to the declining lustre and intensity of the solar beams; and that this loss is the cause of the difference, may be argued from the changes which take place in a wintry country when the revolu- tions of the heavens have placed it in more friendly relation with the sun, for then the plant recovers its leaves and flowers, and the frozen life once more begins to throb in bosoms which had long been without sense or feeling. In this way, indeed, we learn that there is a certain vivifying influence in the sunbeams by virtue of which life rouses into activity, or sinks into a state approaching to death, or death itself, according to the changes which take place in summer and winter; and hence it is no un- philosophical deduction to presume, that similar changes mark the daily periods of the heavens, and that the presence of the sun is one cause of wakefulness, which state, when compared with sleep, is expressive of a higher degree of vitality; and, for the same reason, the absence of this luminary one cause of that less vitalised condition we call sleep. To this view, however, it must be admitted that there are sundry apparent objections, and of these the chief are, the noc- turnal waking of some animals, and the extreme irregularities in .man himself.