The water cure in chronic disease : an exposition of the causes, progress, and terminations of various chronic diseases of the digestive organs, lungs, nerves, limbs, and skin, and of their treatment by water and other hygienic means / by James Manby Gully.

  • Gully, James Manby, 1808-1883.
Date:
1850
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The water cure in chronic disease : an exposition of the causes, progress, and terminations of various chronic diseases of the digestive organs, lungs, nerves, limbs, and skin, and of their treatment by water and other hygienic means / by James Manby Gully. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    organs, from which it spreads, with more or less rapidity, to others, by a sympathy whose physical agent is the nervous sys- tem. By this term, nervous system, the brain, spinal cord, and the nerves proceeding from them, are ordinarily understood ; but there is another system of nerves which, as it is neither obedient to the will, nor cognizant of pain, commonly so called, is rarely considered in the explanation of disease ; in which it, neverthe- less, plays by far the most important—I may say, the only im- portant part. This system of nerves has been called the gan- glionic (from the appearance of small knots or ganglions in the course of the nerves), the organic (as regulating the character of the organization of parts), the nutritive (as presiding over the organs that minister to the nutrition of the body), and the visceral (as pervading and having its centre in the viscera,* that is, in the contents of the chest and abdomen) ; and I shall use these terms indiscriminately in the course of this Essay. Perhaps the most accurate, however, are the epithets nutritive and organic; for, wherever there are organs in the body, or wherever nutrition goes on in it, there are nerves of nutrition to be found. Wherever, too, there is a blood-vessel (and we know not of nutrition without blood), organic nerves accompany it and re- gulate its action. In every part of the body, therefore, organic nerves exist, as in every part of the body blood-vessels exist: the point of the finest needle cannot be introduced into any tissue of the frame without entering one or more blood-vessels and organic nerves.)• The brain itself, containing, as it does, so large a pro- portion of the blood of the body, is, in this view, supplied also with a large proportion of organic nerves. The coincidence of nutritive blood-vessels (called also capillary) and nutritive nerves points to some strict organic connection be- tween them. In fact, it is the presence of the nerves which imparts to the blood-vessels the property of receiving and reacting * The word viscus, of which viscera is the plural, signifies, in the Latin, Blime. And as the older anatomists found the membranes which line the lungs and digestive canal slimy from the mucus they secrete, they applied the characteristic term to the parts themselves, calling each organ of the chest and abdomen, viscus, and the general contents, viscera. This expla- nation was necessary, from the frequency with which I shall be compelled to use the term in these pages. t Ruylcrr, William Hunter, and Lieberkuhn, asserted that every sub- stance of thr animal frame consisted of nothing but vessels.