An experimental inquiry of the general nature of inflammation / by Charles Hastings.

  • Charles Hastings
Date:
1821
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An experimental inquiry of the general nature of inflammation / by Charles Hastings. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    belongs to the excreting tubes, and is evinced in their action on the fluids contained in them. These two subspecies of organic contractility do not arise from different principles ; the one is but the extreme of the other, and these extremes arfc connected by insensible gradations. These gra- dations are well marked in the circulating system, where the heart and the capillary vessels form the two extremes of contractility, and the larger blood vessels are the mean between them. Irritability, he believes, is not peculiar to muscle. It is true, muscles possess the maximum of organic con- tractility, but every living organ acts as they do, though in a manner less apparent, upon the ex- citant, when artificially applied, or on the fluid, which, in the natural way, is carried to it for the purpose of supplying the matter of secretion, nutri- tion, exhalation, or absorption*. It appears, from this short sketch, that Bichat maintained there was a difference in kind between the animal and organic contractility; but by sen- sible and insensible organic contractility he only understood different degrees of the same property. Dr. Parry has more lately treated on the ar- teries, and has used the term tonicity to express their vital power. This power, he observes, is, however, so far different from that which in muscles is called irritability, that an artery * Physiological Researches on Life and Death, by Bichat, translated by Good.