The failure of vivisection and the future of medical research / being the prize essay in a competition instituted by the Leigh Browne endowment / by Arabella Kenealy.

  • Arabella Kenealy
Date:
[1909?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The failure of vivisection and the future of medical research / being the prize essay in a competition instituted by the Leigh Browne endowment / by Arabella Kenealy. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    an admirable proof that the prone position is the one most suited to the emptying and not to the filling of the lungs.) Again, in the prone position, the shoulders and arms drop forward and contract the chest, while in the supine they fall backward and upward and expand the chest. (The main business of drilling, indeed, is to set back the shoulders in order to expand the chest and lungs.) Further, in the prone position, the face of a drowned person will be liable to injury from pressure upon the ground or beach, and in a woman the bosom will also be bruised. Then, too, the face in the supine position can be closely watched for signs of reanimation. That the prone is the better position for resuscitating a drowned dog I accept without hesitation upon the word of an eminent physiologist. But a dog is a dog; a man is a man. The horizontal, prone position of the trunk is normal to the dog. He assumes it when he pants for breath. It is doubtless, being his normal, his best attitude for breathing, just as in man his best attitude is the erect. In that position air more freely enters and more freely circulates in the lungs. In the dog, too, the forelegs are attached to the chest quite differently from the attachment of the arms to the human chest. They cannot be extended and uplifted in such a manner as to broaden the chest and to expand the lungs, as they can be made to do in man. Had Professor Schafer derived his knowledge from human beings instead of from dogs, he would have asked himself, What position is chosen by a man who is suffering from difficult breathing ? Would he see such a person in a sick- ward voluntarily lying prone ? On the contrary, he would see him propped forward in order to raise the shoulders and so to assist the expansion of the lungs and chest. An insensible man cannot, of course, sit up, and, more- over, the horizontal position is necessary in order to lessen the labour of the circulation when this is restored.
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