Volume 1

The influence of tropical climates on European constitutions / By James Johnson ... and James Ranald Martin.

  • James Johnson
Date:
1841
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The influence of tropical climates on European constitutions / By James Johnson ... and James Ranald Martin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    656/716 (page 638)
    indigestible a guality—acrid substances, as drastic purgatives, &c. taken into the stomach, or generated in the alimentary apparatus—sedentary habits. Under these heads all, or almost all, the physical causes may be ranged. They are very numerous, and act through two principal chan- nels—sympathy and direct application. If it be asked how food, which is the natural stimulus of the nerves of the stomach and bowels, should render them morbidly sensible? I might answer, by asking another question—how does light, which is the natural stimulus of the optic nerve, render it morbidly sensible, if too brilliant and too long applied? The parallel, I think, is perfectly just. The same reasoning is applicable to drink. If, for water, we substitute ale, wine, or spirits, in too great quantities, we stimulate the nerves of the stomach ; though some stomachs will bear this stimulation for many years in succession, with little apparent injury. But not so in civilized, and es- pecially in cevie life. By this stimulus the nerves are excited, and, in due time, irritated, so as to set up an habitual state of morbid sensibility. The doctrine of Brown, indeed, teaches us that this constant stimulation will ultimately wear out the excitability of the nerves, and render them Jess sensible than at first to the same stimuli. It may be so; but I much doubt whether, in the last sad years of the confirmed drunkard, the morbid sen- sibility of the stomach and bowels is not still his unhappy lot. His appe- tite and powers of digestion are nearly extinguished, I grant; but the stomach becomes more irritable, in proportion as intemperance has been long-continued ; till, at length, the presence of food cannot be borne with- out pain or sickness, and a very small quantity of that burning potation which he used to swallow so freely, now makes him quickly inebriated. These are facts which we see every day, and they strongly support the po- sition I have laid down. Secr. VIIJ].—Morat Cavszs. Ture is but one path along which these causes can travel from the organ of thought to the organs of digestion ; but the number of airy agents, and the velocity with which they glide along the silvery pneumo-gastric con- ductors, baffle all calculation! The intellectual operations of man, in a state of high civilization, as compared with man in a state of nature, are as much more numerous as the mechanical arts of Europe out-number the simple contrivances of Otaheite. In such proportion, also, his susceptibi- lity to moral impressions is augmented to an inconceivable extent; and these impressions, though first received by the sensorium, are all reflected