The foundations of nutrition / by Mary Swartz Rose.

  • Mary Swartz Rose
Date:
[1927], ©1927
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The foundations of nutrition / by Mary Swartz Rose. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    to demonstrate how living animals affect the air. He took a sparrow, shut it up in a small chamber and con- cluded from his observations that oxygen disappeared from the air and that after the animal had died the carbon dioxide which it produced could all be absorbed from the chamber by limewater. Then Lavoisier and the great physicist Laplace together took another step forward. They put a guinea pig into a chamber and measured for ten hours the carbon dioxide formed by its respiration. This was found to equal that produced by burning in a closed vessel 3.33 grams of carbon. Next the guinea pig was confined for ten hours in a chamber containing a known weight of ice, and the quantity of ice melted by the animal’s body was determined. This required for its melting almost exactly the same amount of heat as was evolved in burning the 3.33 grams of carbon. The obvious con- clusion was that the carbon dioxide formed by the guinea pig came from burning in its body the equivalent of 3.33 grams of carbon.1 Similar observations were subsequently extended to human subjects, and drawings made by Mme. Lavoisier from memory after her husband’s death in 1794 show Lavoisier’s associate, Seguin, sitting in a chair breathing through a mask into a series of globes by means of which the oxygen consumed and the carbon dioxide given off were measured. Lavoisier came to the conclusion that “respiration is only a slow combustion of carbon and hydrogen, which is similar in all respects to that which takes place in a 1 A slight discrepancy was afccounted for in the reduction of the guinea pig’s body temperature by the cold.
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