The health of the blood-vessels / by David Fraser Harris.

  • David Fraser Fraser-Harris
Date:
1900
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The health of the blood-vessels / by David Fraser Harris. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    69 magnitude in order to efficiently maintain the circulation, if the pressure falls below its normal, the circulation will correspond- ingly fail. Fainting is, in fact, a temporary abolition of consciousness from a temporary diminution of the blood-pressure in certain cerebral vascular districts, usually in consequence of the heart having failed to throw sufficient blood into the carotids. Into all the causes liable to inhibit the heart as it is called, or to render its action intermittent, we cannot at present go; but there are two that are quite familiar, great pain and certain emotions. Thanks to anesthetics, the great pain attending surgical opera- tions nowadays rarely affects the heart to the extent of inhibiting it; and thanks apparently to an improved tone of the female nervous system, fainting on the part of ladies has become very rare indeed. According to the novels of the early years of this cen- tury, to faint frequently was more of the nature of a fashion- able accomplishment than an evidence of nervous disability, so that poor Miss Tox seems to have been judged rather harshly by Mrs Chick in that memorable scene in Princess Place. There seems no doubt at all that it would be as difficult for the girl of to-day to faint to order as it was easy for her great- grandmother, and this seems only a particular case of the improved condition of general nerve-health or, at any rate, lessened affectability on the part of women. . Weeping on the slightest provocation has, like famting, also gone out of fashion, and it is a matter for distinct congratulation that notwithstanding the undoubtedly large amount of nerve illness at the present day, there is a type of more robust female nervous system being rapidly evolved. All sudden diminutions of cerebral blood-pressure are to be avoided as productive of a tendency to faintness and even perhaps sickness and giddiness. It is dangerous for certain persons to rise suddenly as out of bed or from the sofa, from the horizontal to the vertical position in fact, since so much blood may be able to leave the brain by the veins under gravity, that the heart may not have been able to send up against gravity a sufficient quantity of fresh blood to replace it. Thus it is that after child-birth or after the removal, for instance, of a large abdominal tumour, the patient ought not to