Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Documents and dates of modern discoveries in the nervous system. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.
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![depends and is inherent, throughout the whole body.* * GENERAL FUNCTION OF THESE ORGANS. From Notes to Richer and—published in 1824. [Recognizing irritability as combined organic sensibility (uncon- scious) and contractility, Dr. Copland proceeds as follows:—] Organic sensibility refers to those sensations which are produced in different degrees of intensity, owing to the existence of certain conditions of those viscera which are immediately subservient to the preservation of the individual and the species—to nutrition and reproduction, and which are not immediately subjected to the influence of volition. The conditions of the parts exciting sensibility are very various, and are the result of irritations arising from the presence of a stimulus, of unnatural actions supervening in particular systems or textures, and of the deficiency of that stimulus or influence to which particular viscera have become accustomed. Many of the changes preceding this class of sensations seem to interest, in the first instance, the ganglial class of nerves ; but, owing to the intimate relation subsisting between this part of the nervous system and the voluntary or sentient part, the impression or change is propagated to the brain. This is the only essential difference which exists between this and the other forms of sensi- bility. It is the brain which perceives in them all; and although stimuli, or the defect of stimuli, may give rise to certain phenomena possessing the characters of the higher manifestations of this property in the organs appropriated to the preservation of the organic system, independently of the sensorium,—consciousness, or the more perfect form of sensibility, cannot form part of the results. Organic sensibility may be active or passive—it may or it may not be attended with consciousness ; and even the unconscious mode of it may indirectly impel to action, or give rise to many of the manifestations or instincts which characterize the lower animals, owing to the ganglial centres, either from their organization or connexions, or from both, performing a greater extent of function](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21721804_0184.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
