Lectures : chiefly clinical / by Thomas King Chambers.

  • Thomas King Chambers
Date:
1865
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Lectures : chiefly clinical / by Thomas King Chambers. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    16/666 (page 6)
    A conjectural theory has been hazarded that Life mysteriously endows living matter with a defensive virtue^ which enables it to resist the chemical and other powers acting regularly on in- organic and dead matter. The most notable instance cited is the stomach,, which digesting everything else is not itself digested. This consumer of flesh is itself made of fleshy yet is not consumed. An answer seems given to the witty philosopher, who on hearing an alchemist boast his discovery of a universal solvent, inquired ^' In what vessel do you keep it T' The stomach says (it has been in the habit of saying wise things even before the time of Menenius Agrippa), In a vessel like me, which is destroyed indeed continuously, but is continuously rebuilt.^'' Recent researches show that living matter, such as parts of living animal swallowed for instance, is dissolved by the gastric juice, and moreover that its own epithelial coat is destroyed, but is immediately replaced by a new one. By this activity of growth (the idea of the impudent members calling the belly lazy !), and by a constantly flowing supply of alkaline blood to neutralize any of the acid secretion which might penetrate too deep, it retains the same shape for three-score years and ten. But it has no privileged immunity against the solvent it makes. It is, then, the Torm which constitutes the Self; and it is^not the changing, decaying matter which was mine, is his, and may be slave to thousands.''^ The organic materials are the property of the form only so long as it retains them, and no longer—they are a floating capital. Over the innate essential nature of the material it has no control. Life cannot make the brute materials which it uses live longer than that which it leaves unused, but it has the power of making them anew, and building them up into a certain shape for the time they are made to last. In short. Life rests on the metamorphosis or Renewal of the body; as this renewal is more thorough, the individual is more perfect, and fulfils better and more completely the duties of its position. If it stops altogether, the body is no longer living. If it partially stops, the order of normal phenomena is disarranged, and ease is expelled—there is a state which we call ^' dis-OYdiQT'' or dis-ease/' To speak, therefore, of a superabundance of life,^^ or of an