Vital motion as a mode of physical motion.

  • Radcliffe, Charles Bland, 1822-1889.
Date:
1882
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Vital motion as a mode of physical motion. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by UCL Library Services. The original may be consulted at UCL (University College London)

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    in nerve. Each property was something vital, something departing at death, something in no wise akin to any power in inanimate nature. The property was a life of which muscular contraction and nervation were acts. Brown, starting from this point, added another idea —that of stimulation. Everything acting upon the vital property of irritability or sensibility (to which he gave the common name of excitability), according to him, acted as an excitant or stimulus. Action is caused by a process of stirring-up, as it were, the capacity for acting being asleep, or at rest, until it is so stirred-up. The idea would seem to be none other than that all vital movement in its nature is identical with that which is produced by teasing a sleeping man until he wakes up and strikes about him in fun or in anger. And this doctrine of vital motion, which thus took form in the speculations of Glisson, Haller, and Brown, is, with little change, the doctrine at present in favour. In point of fact, the position taken at present has but little shifted since the days of the schoolmen, when occult qualities of one kind or another were thought to be a sufficient explanation for everything—^when, for example, terreity, aqueity, and sulphureity, the occult qualities of the three elements, earth, water, and sulphur, of which, in varying proportions, according to Paracelsus, all bodies are composed, were supposed to account for all that was general in these bodies,—when Petreity was thought to be a sufficient explanation of the peculiarities distinguishing Peter from Paul or other men,—when the answer of Argan* to the question, quare opium facit * Molifere, La Malade Imaginaire : 3idme inlermfede.
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