Respiration, or, Why do we breathe? : a lecture delivered before a popular audience / by Patrick Black.

  • Black, Patrick, 1813-1879.
Date:
1876
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Respiration, or, Why do we breathe? : a lecture delivered before a popular audience / by Patrick Black. 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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    noises with smiles and loud merriment, ask her if her heart can tell her what the ‘respiratory nerve of the face’1 is, and she will answer : Oh, yes ! I know it. When the mind is forcibly arrested, as in grief or expect- ancy,2 the movement of breathing will be checked in concert with the feeling, till at length a sigh or long-drawn breath gives the necessary relief to a too-long deferred function. Emotional breathing is well illustrated in the brute. It may be studied in the Zoological Gardens, in the so-called laughter of the hyaena, when expecting his food ; in the feline tribe (lions and tigers) when gloating over their piece of raw flesh, &c. I scarcely enter my stables without exciting it in my horses, who expect apples or a handful from the corn-bin. Come we, in the last place, to the mutual relation of breathing to the heart’s structure and function ; and here we have to consider what provision Nature has made for the accomplishment of that great end, ‘ the aeration of the blood.’ I have already shown that the function of 4 medulla oblongata ’ is to wait upon the heart, and to regulate the movements she governs in the most exact accordance with the demands that are laid upon her. I have shown moreover that these movements are ab- solutely necessary to enable the blood to pass through the lungs, and that this passage of the blood is entirely inde- pendent of the chymical changes which are in a manner incidental to the movement. Hence both the change in the blood and its ownward passage through the lungs are made dependent on one and the same cause, that is, the expansion of the air-vesicles: they are collateral results of this, and not mutually de- pendent. 1 So named by Sir Charles Bell. 2 ‘Breathless attention’ is a common expression.
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