The Hunterian oration : Royal College of Surgeons of England, February 14th, 1895 / by J.W. Hulke.
- Hulke, J. W. (John Whitaker), 1830-1895.
- Date:
- 1895
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: The Hunterian oration : Royal College of Surgeons of England, February 14th, 1895 / by J.W. Hulke. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![both, inasmuch as its cause arises from the living, yet it cannot take effect till after death. He adduces the suggestive fact that animals or parts of animals possessed of the living principle, when taken into the stomach, are not alfected by the [digestive] powers of that viscus so long as the living principle remains. Thence it is (he adds) that we find animals of various kinds living in the stomach or hatched or bred there ; but the moment that any of these lose the living principle they become subject to the digestive powers of the stomach. His argument is that if the living principle was not capable of preserving animal substances from undergoing that process [digestion] the stomach itself would be digested [during life], which it is not. The appearance which he ascribed to post- mortem digestion is a dissolution of the stomach at its great extremity, in consequence of which there is frequently a considerable aperture made in that viscus. The edges of this opening appear to be half dissolved, very much like that kind of dissolution which fleshy parts undergo when half digested in a living stomach, or when dissolved by a caustic alkali, namely, pulpy, tender, and ragged. At a loss to explain these appearances, John Hunter had supposed them to have been produced during life, and to have been the cause of death; but the absence of any associated symptoms, and their frequency in persons who, in good health, had](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21778760_0031.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
