An elementary compendium of physiology : for the use of students / by F. Magendie ; translated from the French with copious notes, tables, and illustrations, by E. Milligan.

Magendie, François, 1783-1855. Précis élémentaire de physiologie. English

Date:: 1829

Credit: An elementary compendium of physiology : for the use of students / by F. Magendie ; translated from the French with copious notes, tables, and illustrations, by E. Milligan. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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

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$By Bichat, thus : (Animal sensibility (sensible 1 Animal contractility \ insensible. Sympathy of< J Organic contractility ( sensible V. Organic sensibility ( insensible. Sympathy is also | Mor'bicK To understand the above table, and the tables of the tissues and functions giver/ in another place, it is proper to observe, that Bichat applied the term Life to any series of vital phenomena subsisting in one part of the body, and supposed to be insulated, or at least little connected with the rest. Thus the heart lives after the lungs cease to act, therefore he has a “ life of the heartthe brain may survive the lungs in certain states, or the lungs the brain, therefore he has a life of the lungs, and a life of the brain. In the same way, he has a life of the kidneys, a life of the spleen, of the liver, and, in short, of all the glands. He has crowned this fruitful source of discovery—the substitution of a new meaning for an old word— by speaking of the organic life, the animal life : not at all signifying by these terms that any of the life of our body is not animal, but merely that the series of parts which connect us with the external world possess one kind of properties ; and that the parts whose office is not with the external world, but with the support and reproduction of the machine, have others totally different. This is all that he means by the terms animal and organic life ; the former implying the vital pro- perties of the organs possessed of sensibility, as the nervous and muscular appara- tus ; the latter embracing all the other organs ; besides the sympathetic nervous, and the involuntary muscular system, as an exception from the animal organs. In short, the whole matter is very simple : Bichat employs the term life instead of “ ]>eculiar vital properties, and has not therefore deviated from this sense of it, whether he speaks of the life of single organs, or of the two great systems. That others have mistaken this language, and thought that he attributed two lives to man, must be ascribed to the obscurity of tbe term life, and to the love which all “ curious readers ” manifest for the wonderful. Bichat allows us at least ten i;veS)—in his sense,—as any person may ascertain by counting them. It happens, indeed, that the animal and organic embrace them all; but whoever reads the first paragraph of Gregory’s Conspectus, published before 1780, will easily learn that this mode of division is neither new nor profound. The novelty and beauty of Bichat’s writings on this subject, lie in the many unnoticed properties of the sympathetic nerve, which he has discovered or collected. Since the publication of our author’s second edition in krench, an able work on the nervous system of the vertebrata, by himself and hi. Desmoulin, has arrived in this country. I find, that except the zoological part, much of which, though foreign to our subject, is to be found embodied in the tables of that name, at the$