On the special function of the sudoriparous and lymphatic systems : their vital import, and their bearing on health and disease / by Robert Willis.
- Robert Willis
- Date:
- 1867
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: On the special function of the sudoriparous and lymphatic systems : their vital import, and their bearing on health and disease / by Robert Willis. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.
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![red discs are seen shooting rapidly along the centres and as if repelled by the walls of the containing channels; the colourless corpuscles, on the contrary, suspended in a film of plasma of very appreciable thickness, interposed between the serried column of blood-discs in the centre and the walls of the vessel, move on, rolling over and over in contact with the bounding parieties, and as if attracted by them. The disposition here is unquestionably one of much significance. “ If the blood moves in the capillary vessels independently of the heart’s action,” says Miiller (Physiol., 2nd ed., p. 236), it must be by virtue of an attraction exerted on it by the walls of the capillary vessels, as supposed by Baumgartner and Koch. But we cannot conceive how such attraction could aid the cir- culation of the blood. . . . unless it is again admitted that this attraction of the capillaries] for the blood is exerted only while the blood retains its arterial character, and ceases when it has become venous.” Kow I apprehend that when the extent of the apparatus is contemplated that is provided for the especial purpose, as I maintain, of effecting a change in the physical constitution of the out-going and the in-coming currents of the circulating fluid, and a consequent ceaseless interchange »of elements between these, in conformity with the laws of heterogeneous attraction or osmosis, we seem to have obtained that which was wanting to explain the remark- able phenomena of the capillary circulation : the walls of the arteries, from the sigmoid valves at the root of either of the great cardiac trunks, to the limits of their peripheral ramifica- tions, are incessantly transuding the plasma that gives life to the several organs of the body, and are at the same time part- ing with a fluid of considerably less density than the plasma or liquor sanguinis, this fluid being either abstracted by the su- doriparous glands and dissipated, or appropriated by the vital act of the lymphatics and returned at the proper moment for the use of the economy. The veins, on the contrary, filled with a fluid augmented in density by the whole amount of the water that has been thrown off from the surface of the body.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21309553_0057.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
