Outlines of medical proof : revised and corrected, with remarks on its application to certain forms of irregular medicine / by Thomas Mayo.

  • Thomas Mayo
Date:
1850
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Outlines of medical proof : revised and corrected, with remarks on its application to certain forms of irregular medicine / by Thomas Mayo. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    liquor potass®, not only in making them discharge their contents, but in modifying the product. Thus it happens that a description is confounded with a • process of reasoning, or converted into it. The plastic or formative powers assigned to cells are not conditions im- plied in the relations in which those cells and molecules are witnessed through the microscope whether combined or in successive development. The relation of cause ami effect, inferred by Dr. Addison, is unproved at present, and awaits the discovery of a real power, as it would be called according to the doctrine of efficient causes, or of a sound hypothe- tical explanation, as we should venture to term the deficient element. The plastic or formative power of cells forms the basis, in Schwann’s admirable work, of much reasoning seductive, as it appears to me, from the real mode of obtaining truths on the construction of tissues and the production of secretions. Beginning with an admission of his hypothetical mode of proceeding, “ the unknown cause presumed to be capable of explaining these processes may he called the plastic [>ower ot the cells/’ Ids reasoning proceeds absolutely and authori- tatively, as if a true cause had been eliminated*. In the first place, there is a power of attraction exerted, at the com- mencement of cell life, in the molecules, which occasions the addition of fresh molecules to those first observed. Now lot us consider what explanatory force this word attraction may possess. u Physical attraction is said to act at sensible and insen- sible distances: in the former sense it is in relation to our globe, gravitation disposing all bodies to descend to the east. In the other senses it preserves the forms of bodies, modifies textures, gives spherical forms to fluids, causes adhesions of surfaces and influences their mechanical cha- racter ] operating upon dissimilar particles it produces their muon. But in all these cases it acts agreeably to laws. It is for the microscopist to point out under what laws hi*