An address delivered before the Suffolk District Medical Society, at its second anniversary meeting, Boston, March 28, 1851 / by Samuel Parkman.

Date:
1851
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An address delivered before the Suffolk District Medical Society, at its second anniversary meeting, Boston, March 28, 1851 / by Samuel Parkman. 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.

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    our first investigation would be whether the laws of matter hold good as regards them, it would seem the natural process to endeavor to reduce these vital phenomena as much as possible under laws which we already understand, and to seek in a known di- rection their explanation. It is evident that if the functions of the human body were performed upon an entirely distinct and peculiar set of principles, there could be no assimilation between the two forms of matter, the animate and the inanimate—no re- ciprocal action of the one upon the other. The in- gested food is composed of certain chemical con- stituents, which must retain their chemical relations equally within as without the body. If principles that should be ejected are retained, there is nearly a certainty that they too must act in the same manner in their new and false situation as if they were re- stored to the world at large. There is reason, for example, to believe, that the poisonous effects of arsenic are in some measure dependent upon its anti- septic properties—upon its power of arresting the disintegration of the component elements of tissue, and thus retaining within the economy principles which should be discharged as effete. And it may be that all poisons, animal, vegetable and mineral, act in like manner by their chemical effects. AVlien, therefore, we have mastered all these and similar phenomena, and have studied all the reciprocal actions in the human frame, then we shall be enti- tled to leave the residue to be accounted for by this