A treatise on the blood, inflammation, and gun-shot wounds / by John Hunter ; with notes by James F. Palmer.

  • John Hunter
Date:
1840
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A treatise on the blood, inflammation, and gun-shot wounds / by John Hunter ; with notes by James F. Palmer. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    or form vessels deeper and deeper, in the coagulum, till they all meet in its centre. If it is by the first mode, viz., the shooting of vessels from the surrounding surfaces into the coagulum, then it may be the ruptured vessels, in cases of accident, which shoot into the coagulum; and where a coagulum, or extravasation of coagu- lable lymph, is thrown in between two [sound] surfaces only con- tiguous, there it' may be the exhaling vessels of those surfaces which now become the vessels of the part. In whatever way they meet in the centre, they instantly embrace, unite, or inosculate. Now this is all perfectly and easily conceived among living parts, but not otherwise. As the coagulum, whether wholly blood or coagulating lymph alone, has the materia vitas in its composition, which is the cause of all the above actions, it soon opens a communication with the mind, forming within itself nerves. Nerves have not the power of forming themselves into longer chords, as we conceive vessels to have ; for we know that in the union of a cut nerve, where a piece has been taken out, it is by means of the blood forming a union of coagulum, and that the coagulum gradually becomes more and more of the texture, and has, of course, more and more the use, of a nerve, somewhat similar to the gradual change of blood into a bone in fractures. It would appear, then, that the blood is subservient to two pur- poses in an animal: the one is the support of the matter of the body when formed, the other is the support of the different actions of the body.* * [On Life.—Although it would be foreign to the object of these notes to enter into a lengthened discussion on the nature cf life in general, I shall, I trust, need no apology for presenting the reader with a condensed view of Mr. Hunter's opinions on the subject, since by so doing I shall furnish him with the means of more clearly comprehending the nature, and more exactly estimating the value of the arguments adduced by the author in support of his peculiar views respecting the life of the blood. Mr. Hunter had a great dislike to definitions, for, said he, a definition allows one to bring together a thousand things that have not the least connexion with it; and for thisl-eason probably he has abstained from setting forth, in the shape of a formal definition, his notions of life in the abstract. As it is necessary, however, when speaking of life, to fix on at least some of its essential properties by which to recognise its presence or absence, I shall take as a definition a short statement Mr. Hunter has made in his lectures, Principles of Surgery, p. 21, of what he calls the most simple ideas of life. 1. The first and most simple idea of life, says he, is its being the principle of self-preservation. 2. The second is its being the principle of action, or, as he has elsewhere stated it, the susceptibility to impression, with a consequent power of action. These are two very different properties, though arising from the same principle, and will require separate consideration. I. Of the principle of self-preservation.— By the living principle, 6ays Mr. Hunter, I mean to express that principle which prevents matter from falling into dissolution,—resisting heat, cold, and putrefaction I have asserted that life simply is the principle of preservation, preserving it from putrefaction. Bodies belonging to the animal and vegetable kingdoms, considered as mere chemical compounds, must, from the energetic affinities of their component ele- ments, be exceedingly prone to spontaneous decomposition; nevertheless, we find