An essay, or tract, on the vitality of the warm blood and air / by James Morison ; edited and republished by Elisha North.

  • James Morison
Date:
1835
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An essay, or tract, on the vitality of the warm blood and air / by James Morison ; edited and republished by Elisha North. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    of the mechanism or construction of the lungs. The heart now beats, [independently of the mo- ther,] the stomach craves iood and digests, and the bowels evacuate ; the infant is then detached from its mother, it receives no more of her blood; and is now in the great world, furnished wilh an apparatus to make blood for itself, and to continue its own existence. This is the beginning of what we call perfect individual life ; and it is brought about in a physical comprehensible manner. We see therefrom, that the [warm oxygenized] blood of the mother was the principal agent in forming vital seminal matter into the body of the infant; but though possessing all its organs it had not all the attributes of perfect [self-life,] until the air had acted upon its own lungs and set all the machine in motion—that is to say made the blood to cir- culate [quickly.] We thus arrive at the first and only true prin- ciple of life, and learn therefrom, that there is no vitality or vital principle existing in any part of organization aside from what proceeds from the [warm] blood, which acts with said orgazation. During the period of gestation, nature, or to speak more definitely, the blood of the mother has not been negligent. Although the child was not often eating, the mother's blood has supplied its stomach, liver, and intestines, with a fluid called the gastric juice and bile, as necessary for dissolv- ing or digesting the food of the new born infant; this appeals from the early evacuation of the me- conium or concrete bile, by the new born infant, which had been accumulating, in its entrails, during the period of the child's growth, in the womb: from this we see evidently, that the bile is not ex- tracted Irom our aliments, as vulgarly thought, but it is a fluid furnished from the whole mass of gur blood, by the agency of the liver, as it is accu-