An introduction to medical literature, including a system of practical nosology : intended as a guide to students, and an assistant to practitioners. Together with detached essays, on the study of physic, on classification, on chemical affinities, on animal chemistry, on the blood, on the medical effects of climates, on the circulation, and on palpitation / by Thomas Young.

Date:: 1823

Credit: An introduction to medical literature, including a system of practical nosology : intended as a guide to students, and an assistant to practitioners. Together with detached essays, on the study of physic, on classification, on chemical affinities, on animal chemistry, on the blood, on the medical effects of climates, on the circulation, and on palpitation / by Thomas Young. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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follows that, even in this charcoal, these compounds do not exist in the state of salts already formed, and it is very pro- bable that the blood contains their primitive component parts in a totally different state of combination. Hence I have concluded that the quantity of bone earth, supposed to exist in the blood, is not really contained in it, since it cannot be extracted by a diluted acid from dried blood ; but that bone earth must always be a product of the decomposition of the blood, by which it is formed precisely at the place which requires its presence. [The colouring matter affords -j!_ of its weight of red ashes, more than one half of which is oxyd of iron. Djurk. II. p. xxvii.] The cause of the coagulation of the blood is wholly un- known : the irritability, which appears to be excited in the fibrin by the electrochemical battery, has been very justly explained by Heidmann, as depending on the motion pro- duced by the rapidity of the coagulation, which causes the fibres to bend themselves. The three component parts of the blood appear to resemble each other very much in their chemical constitution, so that they may easily either be transmuted one into another, or be employed for producing the same effects in secretion, or in the restoration of parts which require to be replaced. The blood of bullocks approaches very near to that of men, so that we may easily understand the possibility of its transfusion into the human veins with safety. There is however one remarkable difference. In the human blood, the fibrin, as well as the coloured matter and the albumen, after having been dried, burn much more readily to ashes, and the coal requires neither so strong nor so long continued a heat to destroy it, as that of the blood of oxen. This difference evidently depends on the greater proportion of nitrogen contained in the bullock’s blood, which is also further demonstrated by the constant production of carbo- nate of ammonia from bullock’s blood, when it is burnt more slowly, notwithstanding the free access of air. This

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