Carbonic acid in medicine / by Achilles Rose, M.D. ; with the portraits of van Helmont, Priestley and Lavoisier.

  • Achilles Rose
Date:
1905
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Carbonic acid in medicine / by Achilles Rose, M.D. ; with the portraits of van Helmont, Priestley and Lavoisier. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

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    within certain limits, does not specially depend on the amount of oxygen in the atmospheric air. Indeed, it is known that the increase of the oxygen pressure, even to the strength of one atmosphere, has no essential influence on either the amount of oxygen taken into the lungs or the amount of carbonic acid which is exhaled. Paul Bert found that animals placed in pure oxygen under a pressure of three atmospheres, or in ordinary atmospheric air under a pressure of fifteen atmospheres, have convulsions and quickly perish; whence it would appear that oxygen at high tension is inimical to life. This oxygen intoxication is characterized by an extraordinary reduction of the consumption of oxygen and by the formation of carbonic acid. All organisms, animal as well as vege- table, succumb alike. Even seeds of plants which in general are possessed of great power of resistance lose for a certain time, when ex- posed to oxygen under high pressure, their ger- minative power. Oxygen exerts a deleterious effect on the different organisms when they are [13]