On breathing and ventilation / by Alfred Schofield.

  • Alfred Taylor Schofield
Date:
[1890?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On breathing and ventilation / by Alfred Schofield. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    These tracts are written in the earnest endeavour, first of all, to enable us to take due care of this physical gift of God so as to maintain our lives in health and activity; and secondly, to strengthen us in various ways in that higher spiritual life, without which we can never enter the Kingdom of God.1 At present, then, we will consider the breath of life; why we breathe, how we breathe, what we should breathe, and what we should not breathe. The Air. The air, extending some forty miles upwards from the surface of the earth, consists of oxygen, the life sustainer of the world, diluted with four times its bulk of nitrogen, and a minute quantity of—what if by itself and in excess would be to us a most deadly poison, though it is the life of the vegetable world- carbonic acid gas. We breathe this air in order to supply our bodies with oxygen, without which existence could not go on a single moment; and the way in which this gas is distributed to the body is as follows. The Blood. The blood, the vital fluid, is the carrier of this oxygen, as well as of all food, to every one of the millions of living cells of which the body is composed, all of which constantly take in the breath of life. The blood, rushing through the body a thousand times a day, parts with the oxygen it carries to these cells each time it passes them, receiving from them in ex¬ change carbonic acid gas. After leaving the cells, the blood returns to the lungs, 1 John iii. 3,