Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Practical essays / by Sir Charles Bell. 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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![and diminishes the force of circulation in the brain. Originating in the brain, the cause happily ceases with the insensibility, and the patient revives. When there has been great loss of blood, fainting may be succeeded by death. The expression in common parlance for this sudden death is collapse,—a term once familiar to the learned, but then, as now, unin- telligible ; unless it means the action of the heart on an insufficient supply of blood \an<zmasis\. In effect this is equivalent to debility of the heart itself [as- thenia, abattement], and both these causes combining make hsemorrhage in the dropsical and chlorotic very dangerous,—they faint and do not recover. I need hardly say, that to procure fainting, in order to save the infliction of pain during an operation, is unwarrantable. If the pain of the operation does not rouse the sufferer to consciousness, what will ? Severe and long continued surgical operations may be attended with fainting, as torture and grievous wounds are. We witness this in the reduction of dislocations ; there is, however, in such cases, some- thing peculiar in the nature of the pain, or rather in the part which suffers. Death may be caused by direct injury to the ner- vous system. A severe blow on the stomach kills instantly. If a man, having fallen from a height, be](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21962777_0015.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
