Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: On sea sickness / by J.R. Stocker. 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.
16/22 page 12
![Bonie Mftj years ago, bv Herbert Mayo; and essentially con- finned by plijsioloyical writers at the i)resent day. They tell ITS that sea sickness is a sensori-motor act (Carpenter, Marshall), and speak of common sensation as complex, consisting of the sense of touch, teinpsratare, the muscular sense, hunger, thirst, satiety, want of breath, fatigue, exhaustion (Marehall) ; but it was Mayo who was the first to recognise the fact. The index of his original observations that he gives in the preface to his work on physiology contains the following passage :— Remarks upon impressions of direction and motion; of equihbrium;hy])othesis maintained of the dependence of sea sickness upon the sense of disturbed equilibrium. He explains it thus:— There is a feehng- attending the sudden beginning or retardation or accelera- tion of motion, which is independent of the sense of contact excited on one or other of the aspects of the body, and of ■ muscular effoi-t. When one is in a state of equable motion, as when one lies upon the ground (there being then the earth's motion only to be taken into accoimt), or in the perfectly smooth and uniform motion of a boat gliding down a river, we feel that we are at rest. Any sudden alteration of the quantity of motion in us we/eeZ by the sense of motion. The existence of the same sense^ may be rendered evident in another maimer. After travel- ling a short distance in a rough carriage (to the city for instance in an omnibus), when the carriage has stopped, and you liave remained on your seat for a few seconds, as you rise suddenly, you feel, for an instant or two. as if the carriage- were still in motion ; this is the sense of motion continuing- '•' after the external cause has ceased, as the sensation produced by a flash of lightning remains in the eye longer than the light itself. It is not easy, he adds, to say where this sense exists, whether m the muscles only, or in the joints and sinews and integuments, or in the whole frame together. Another passage in the same work is well worth quoting here :— JTothing appears simpler or easier, or more^](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22292573_0016.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
