Essay on the nature and treatment of cholera and fever : with medical remarks on the treatment of cattle plague : also an appendix on public health / by James Tucker.

  • Tucker, James
Date:
1865
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Essay on the nature and treatment of cholera and fever : with medical remarks on the treatment of cattle plague : also an appendix on public health / by James Tucker. 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.

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    electro-magnetic iron, for without them the oxygen cannot be attracted into the blood, carried round the circulation by the red globules, to combine electro-chemically with the carbonaceous matters, and thus to elaborate carbonic acid, and to liberate animal heat, and bodily sensation, in the capillary cells. The successful results reported by some from the inhalations of oxygen gas in the treatment of cholera, and the failure of it in the hands of others, seems to depend upon the electro-excitant saline, and the electro- magnetic condition of the blood being favourable or otherwise, for its administration. The experiments of Mr. Broughton show that animals confined in oxygen gas die comatose in a few hours. The atmospheric mixture of this gas is more congenial to our constitutions ; it is not from any want or deficiency of oxygen in the air we breathe, but from the want of means to attract it into the circulation, that patients suffer in the last stage pf cholera. The importance of the respiratory functions for the purification of blood in the lungs, and the attraction of oxygen into the circu- lation, may be perceived from their nature and extent. At each respiration twenty cubic inches of air enter the lungs, which are diffused over a pulmonary surface thirty times the extent of the external cutaneous surface or skin; four hundred cubic inches enter in a minute, and 376 cubic feet, or 36 hogsheads of atmo- spheric air, in 24 hours. To meet this amount of air, one-fifth of which is oxygen, the heart propels two ounces of blood at each pulsation into the lungs, which at 75 pulsations in the minute, will amount in 24 hours, to a quantity equal to 24 hogsheads. Electricity is the power by which this immense amount of work is performed. The following estimate, founded on the experiments of Dalton, shows the relative amount of work performed by each vital organ in the removal of the refuse materials and will throw much light upon the treatment of cholera. Ninety-one ounces of solid and fluid ingesta are thrown out, as exhalations, through the several outlets of the body, as follows;—
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