The therapeutics of the respiratory passages / by Prosser James.

  • James, Prosser, 1836-1918
Date:
1884
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The therapeutics of the respiratory passages / by Prosser James. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    any extent and in all circumstances. We may, indeed, admit that work necessarily being attended by waste, increase of work should lead to more rapid waste, as it undoubtedly does, and this again to more rapid repair, more active life, greater health. This is so within certain limits, exercise is enjoyable, the waste caused by it is repaired quickly, energy is freely liberated, and bounding health with full joyous life results. But there is a point when fatigue comes on and we find that each indi- vidual machine, though all are constructed on the same lines, is specially adapted for its own work and its own rate of performing that work, however true it may be, that as a self-repairing, self-growing, self-ad- justing, and even self-improving machine, it may within certain limits attain toward the perfection of others. There is one more point. Strange as it may appear, when we view life from this standpoint it is closely related to death. We speak of the stoppage of the machine, but the analogy fails. Construction, repair ceases, but destruction goes on, or rather, after a pause a new mode of destruction begins. We have seen that all the waste is indeed only a sort of combustion or oxidation of our tissues. Well, after death, as we call it, these tissues decay, and what is that but oxidation ? We consign the no longer animate clay of our beloved ones to the grave, where it slowly moulders back to mother earth. The result would be the same if we adopted the plan of cremation, and burnt, that is, rapidly oxidized, their mortal remains. In either case the products of the oxida- tion of the body are the same—chiefly water, carbonic acid, ammonia, and salts; and these are the substances which during life result from the oxida- tion of the tissues and food which, as no longer serviceable, are excreted. So that as in life organic material is continually being oxidized and re- turned as waste to the inorganic kingdom, so in death the same result happens to all the body at once. The stages, indeed, through which the particles pass may vary, the rate of travelling may differ, the stopping- places may not be the same, but the ultimate goal, the end of the jour- ney is the same in death as in life. So in the midst of life we are in death, as Luther said, whose phrase has been copied into our burial service. Had Watts a poetic prescience of this when he wrote : The moment when our lives begin We all begin to die V To return. For our present purpose we may regard healthy vital action, life, if you will, as a process of continual destruction on the one hand, counterbalanced by compensatory repair and construction on the other. But this normal condition may vary, and then we have disease. Always during life destruction is going on ; always, therefore, its products are accumulating and always must be cast off. Now it is easy to see how these actions may vary in rate or be otherwise imperfectly carried
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