Notes of three lectures on the physiological action of strychnia / delivered by George Harley.

  • Harley, George, 1829-1896.
Date:
[1856]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Notes of three lectures on the physiological action of strychnia / delivered by George Harley. 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.

    16/16 (page 16)
    of a frog, when freed from the skin, absorb oxygen and exhale carbonic acid in definite proportion so long as muscular irrita- bility continues, and have also pointed out that when irritability ceases, an important change takes place in the amount of oxygen absorbed and carbonic acid exhaled. In my experi- ments on the blood, strychnine was found to destroy the pro- perty possessed by the organic constituents of the liquid to absorb oxygen and exhale carbonic acid. May strychnia not act in a similar manner upon the muscles and other tissues of the body ? Upon this supposition we can easily explain why the heart ceased to pulsate, and the voluntary muscles to respond to the stimulus of galvanism, when placed in a solution of strychnine, as well as to account for the fact that in animals poisoned by strychnine the irritability of the voluntary and involuntary muscles, as well as the excitability of the nerves, disappears more quickly than when life is destroyed by other means. Dr. Brown-Seguard thinks that the action of strychnine ‘ ‘ consists in an increase of nutrition of the nervous centres, by which excess of nutrition the reflex faculty becomes much increased. ” The deeper I go into the subject the farther I differ from this view, and the more am I inclined to believe that strychnine acts by destroying the power of the tissues and fluids of the body to absorb oxygen and exhale carbonic acid; in a word, from thus arresting nutrition by preventing the interchange of the gases in the animal economy. i