Volume 1

Modern medicine : its theory and practice / in original contributions by American and foreign authors ; edited by William Osler ; assisted by Thomas McCrae.

  • William Osler
Date:
1907-1910
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Modern medicine : its theory and practice / in original contributions by American and foreign authors ; edited by William Osler ; assisted by Thomas McCrae. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    66/986 (page 42)
    that the conception of central rings with side-chains capable of renewal and replacement by side-chains of another order, of satisfaction of the side-chains and casting loose of the same into the surrounding medium, is the only concept fitted to explain the phenomena of recovery from infection, and immunity. Under the action of bacterial toxins certain cells gain new or exalted properties. Certain side-chains, it is held, combine with and neutralize these toxins, and wdien satisfied these side-chains are cast loose and others are formed; nay more, are formed in excess and cast loose in an unsatisfied condition to form the antitoxic substances present in the blood-serum. In cases of long-continued im¬ munity it is obvious that the bioplasm of the cells once incited to form side-chains having a specific reaction with specific toxins,—or with vege¬ table poisons such as abrin and ricin, is henceforth altered. The new biophoric molecules developed in the course of growth retain for a shorter or longer period the properties impressed on the earlier molecules, and this in the absence of the specific toxin or poison. Heredity, as dis¬ tinct from variation, must be regarded as the expression of this tendency on the part of biophoric molecules to attract to themselves and build up into new biophoric molecules identical ions of atoms and radicals. 9. Before discussing sexual conjugation and its effects upon inheri¬ tance and variations, it is necessary to say a word regarding cell structure. The argument that in the nuclear matter is contained the heritable sub¬ stance seems to us impregnable. We must regard the biophoric molecules as contained in the nucleus, and our conception of the cell and its peculiar structure in all higher forms of life must be that the division into nucleus and cytoplasm is an arrangement whereby the highly differentiated bio¬ phoric molecules, unable to act directly on the surrounding outer medium, become surrounded by an intermediate preparatory medium, the cyto¬ plasm, the component molecules of which are not biophores. The nucleus alone cannot maintain life; neither can the cytoplasm alone exhibit growth. At most this latter can assimilate and form paraplasmic sub¬ stances which in the absence of the nucleus do not become part and parcel of the bioplasm; the nucleus is essential for growth.1 10. If we accept this view of the nature of the biophores it is not neces¬ sary to demand, as does Weismann, that there is conveyed to the off¬ spring in the germ two forms of matter—that constituting the germ-plasm and that forming the somatic-plasm, the latter controlling the develop¬ ment of the individual tissues and cells of the organisms, the former aJ°ne a^e react at the proper time and initiate the development of the offspring. Such a conception introduces unending confusion. Taking the simplest case, that of a multicellular organism developed asexually by parthenogenesis, our conception must be that as the ovum segments and the cells assume different relationships the one to the other, and to the surrounding medium, the influences acting on the various orders of cells vary, ^ and with this variation the constitution of the biophores present and growing in the nuclei of the different cell-groups, undergoes a co¬ incident alteration; so that, for example, the biophores in the eventual muscle-cell possesses a different constitution from those in a nerve-cell. T have discussed more fully this dominance of the nucleus and its relation to °]^dress at the Toronto meeting of the British Medical Asso¬ ciation. British Medical Journal, 1906, II.