On corpulence in relation to disease : with some remarks on diet / by William Harvey.
- Date:
- 1872
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: On corpulence in relation to disease : with some remarks on diet / by William Harvey. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.
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![could not establish but on theoretical grounds the fact of this degeneration, we may, by adapting ourselves to the ad- vancement of science, use language even stronger than he did of that inferior material, fat, which commonly advances as life is weakened, and is one of the best possible evidences of decline, and proof of debility. We may remark in cases of fatty de- generation or decay, that the substance which replaces the highly-organized animal matter, is not utterly inorganic. It is less organized, and less organizable, but still capable of being called alive. Of our living bodies, fat is apart and a necessary part; but still it is not capable of performing the highly vital duties of muscular tissue, of being as thoroughly alive. De- generated products, therefore, so long as they form part of the body, may still be said to be alive, but less than the normal tissues they replace; and degenerate growth may be justly described as “diminished life,”—or in other words, “partial death.” Degeneration in short, is a more or less relapse into a lower and lower form of organic life, and exhibits itself therefore in a variety of grades and amounts. Occurring in various parts, it occasions three-quarters of the chronic ill- nesses which give work to the physician. Let it be well under- stood that these half-living tissues are by no means necessarily lessened in size. A battered, tinkered vessel is often much bulkier than a strong new one ; and in the same way these under-nourished parts are often enlarged, and so have been wrongly supposed to be over-nourished. They often attain a most cumbersome weight and bigness, without really con- taining tissue enough to do their work; they become, in truth, a foreign substance. Sometimes they acquire what seems like a parasitic life, and grow as if independent of the body which they inhabit.—Chambers.] Whichever hypothesis is correct, it is a fact universally ad- mitted by the scientific world, that by freely supplying the means of respiration, an extensive development of fat is pro-](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21950520_0157.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
