Copy 1, Volume 1

The study of medicine. Improved from the author's manuscripts, and by reference to the latest advances in physiology, pathology, and practice / [John Mason Good].

  • Good, John Mason, 1764-1827
Date:
1834
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The study of medicine. Improved from the author's manuscripts, and by reference to the latest advances in physiology, pathology, and practice / [John Mason Good]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    61/784 (page 7)
    part. In its substance it consists of three principal coats or layers, the external and internal of which are membranous, and the middle muscular. The internal coat, moreover, is lined with a villous or downy apparatus, and is extremely convoluted or wrinkled; the wrinkles increasing in size as the diameter of the stomach contracts. [Few parts are more largely supplied with blood-vessels than the stomach, and it not only partakes of the ganglionic nerves with the neighbouring viscera, but it likewise derives another supply of nerves from the spinal cord, and is distinguished from every other part, except the organs of sense, by having a pair of cerebral nerves almost entirely devoted to it, though it is situated at so great a distance from tke brain.*] In an adult it will commonly contain three pints, or rather more ; [and, according to Soemmerring, when it is moderately distended, it will hold from five to eleven pints. In opening some carnivorous animals directly after death, a middle muscular constriction is noticed, dividing the organ imperfectly into two compartments. Sir Everard Home deems a similar con- striction natural to the human subject, and dwells much upon it in his theory of digestion. Soemmerring+ occasionally noticed it in females, in whom he supposed it to be caused by the pressure of the central bone of their stays. According to Andral{, it is mostly the result of a change of texture, or of a contraction of the mus- cular coat, and sometimes a congenital imperfection. He conceives, that it indicates in man the first degree of tendency to the kind of division of the stomach distinctly manifested in some other animals. If, however, in him the stomach naturally consists but of a single cavity, without any constriction, or partition, a division of that organ is not the less evinced in him by other circumstances. Thus, the structure of the mucous membrane is certainly not exactly alike in the splenic and pyloric portions of the stomach. Their functions are also quite as different, while they are still further distinguished by the relative frequency and even the nature of their alterations of texture. In some animals, the different organisation of the two portions of the stomach is manifest to the eye: thus, in the horse, all the inside of the splenic portion is lined by a thick cuticle. The stomach of the negro is rounder and shorter than that of the European; and a still more remarkable roundness exists in the stomachs of apes, as is represented in Daubenton’s excellent plates. With respect to the muscular fibres of the human stomach, the question is frequently agitated, whether they have any share or not in rejecting the contents of that viscus in the act of vomiting ? M. Chirac gave a dog some corrosive sublimate on a piece of bread, which was almost immediately vomited up, though a violent retch- ing afterwards continued. In this state of things, the animal’s abdomen was opened, and the peristaltic action of the stomach appeared to be so feeble, that Chirac was led to infer, that the expulsion of its contents could not be owing to it. Even when the experimenter’s finger was applied to the stomach, while the retching was going on, it is said, that no contraction of this organ could be felt.§ | Duverney also regarded the stomach as entirely passive in * See Bostock’s Elem. Syst. of Physiology, vol. ii. p. 443. + Mem. of Bavar. Acad. of Sciences. ' ¢ Anat. Pathol. t. ii. p. 133. § Hist. de Acad. des Sciences, 1686, B 4 Stomach. Central constric- tion of the stomach. Vomiting.