Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Outlines of human pathology / by Herbert Mayo. 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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![INTRODUCTION. OF DEATH; AND OF THE ELEMENTS OF PATHOLOGICAL STUDY. There is a life, which is simply vegetative. This is displayed in plants, and in molse or imperfect con- ceptions of animals. It consists in nutrition; that is to say, in the performance of certain actions through which the individual imbibes, and assimilates, and distributes through its frame, foreign matter, with the double end of preserving itself against the de- stroying influence of external agents, and of pro- ducing other similar beings to perpetuate its species. The death of vegetative life is the cessation of nutri- tion : a time arrives, when foreign matter is no longer imbibed and assimilated, and when the organized body yields to decay. Animal life is vegetative life, and something more. An animal, like a plant, grows by nutrition; but besides the organs employed in assimilation and secretion, it has others [formed in it by the same principles of growth as the assimilating organs] in which, through a mysterious union, sensation and volition, instinct and reason, temporarily reside. Of these organs in the higher animals, and in man, the brain is the essential one: the extinction of the function of the brain is](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21958518_0025.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
