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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than in the blood; whence I have concluded, that these substances are absorbed, and carried into the circulation, in order to be excreted with the urine, in which they are found again, in considerable quantity. [It may be objected, that these substances, if they are superfluous in the blood, ought not to be transmitted to the milk ; but the author seems to consider their presence in this, and other secreted fluids, as wholly indifferent to the functions of those fluids, the secretory organs having little or no influence on any of the contents of the blood, except its three principal constituent parts. (Afh. III.) The two substances, so often mentioned, may perhaps, for the pre- sent, be distinguished by the name of peculiar animal ex- tract, soluble in water and alcohol, and peculiar mucilage, insoluble in alcohol. The peculiar extract has not been obtained free from the alkaline lactate. (Afh. III. 13.)] [The peculiar mucilage is separated from the other parts of the watery extract of the residuum left by alcohol, by saturating the alkali present with acetic acid, and dissolving the acetate in alcohol : the remaining mass, when dissolved, filtered, and dried, affords a pale grey laminated substance, having not an unpleasant taste of meat: It is precipitated by galls and by sublimate ; in the analysis of the blood, I have called it altered albumen, and it resembles so much the substance obtained by boiling pure fibrin in water, that I should almost consider these substances as identical. It may be separated from the precipitate with sublimate, by means of sulfureted hydrogen. The precipitate with galls is flocculent, and does not form a mass, like that which is obtained from gelatin, a substance which is never exhibited without the operation of boiling or of acids. But after long boiling, the peculiar mucilage contained in urine affords an elastic and adhesive precipitate, like that of gelatin : the same is true of the peculiar extract, which is so intimately connected with the lactic acid : but I have never obtained a fluid capable of forming a jelly from either of these sub- stances. Afh. III. 15.]

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