Therapeutics of the circulation / by Sir Lauder Brunton.

  • Lauder Brunton
Date:
1914
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Therapeutics of the circulation / by Sir Lauder Brunton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    whole of the other thirteen ? This force is the elastic recoil of the arteries, which have been stretched by the blood forced into them during the ventricular systole, but which, if healthy, again contract during the diastole. The vessels thus act as a storage of energy ; j ust like a watch- spring when wound up every night, or like the water driven by a force-pump into a high tank from which a house or town can be supplied, or like the elastic bag in a spray-producer. The arteries have really three functions. They not only act as (i) storers of force, as just mentioned, but as (2) regulators, and as (3) motors. Storage Action.—This is chiefly effected by the aorta and larger arteries, which contain a quantity of elastic tissue. Regulating Action.—Their power of regulat¬ ing the supply of blood to different parts of the body was known to Harvey, who said : “ It is manifest that the blood in its course does not everywhere pass with the same celerity, neither with the same force, in all places, and at all times. ... In fear, and under a sense of infamy and of shame, the face is pale; but the ears burn, as if for the evil they heard or were to hear.”2 As my old teacher, Professor Ludwig, used to put it, “ There is not nearly sufficient blood in the body to fill all the vessels at once, and the vaso-motor system, which regulates the size of the arteries, is like the turncock in a large town who turns off the water-supply to one district at the same time that he turns it on to another”; just as in Harvey’s observation,
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