On life and its lessons : being the inaugural address delivered to the Bristol Medico-Chirurgical Society, in the session 1882-83 / by James George Davey.

  • Davey, James George, 1813-1895.
Date:
1883
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On life and its lessons : being the inaugural address delivered to the Bristol Medico-Chirurgical Society, in the session 1882-83 / by James George Davey. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    arc enabled to perform their allotted functions in the animal economy—in other words to think (cerebrate), to decarbonize the blood, to circulate the blood, to secrete bile, etc., and so on to the end. The remarks to follow will, it is hoped, prove or demonstrate the above assertions. There is a famous axiom—very generally accepted by physi- ologists—and this may, with much propriet}--, preface this essay On Life and its Lessons. Without a nervous system there is no animal, there can be none; without a circulating one there are myriads. Now it is in no small degree favorable to the materialistic view of life—regarding it as an assemblage of functions in man—that what is first seen in the foetus are certain rude and immature traces of nervous matter on either side of the spine ; and that such nervous matter constitutes in due course a bundle of cells: and that this bundle of cells realises in its further progress the basis, or central point, of the great sympathetic nen^e : and, hence, the origin, or creation, of that wonderful force on which the several vital phenomena are dependent in both man and the lower order of animals. To the Solar Plexus,'^ so called, and its accessor}^ ganglia, must be referred—and on grounds to be shewn herein—-the power necessary to enable the organism, both in its incomplete and in its complete condition, to perform its offices in the animal economy. The farther growth and multiplication of cellS; or their coalescence (ganglia), assumes a corresponding growth and development of parts of the organism indispensable to the full maturity of man and animals. Now if such cell formation is interrupted, then there is seen a corresponding interruption in the progress of the organism, or of parts of it, towards perfection ; and so it is that monstrosities are not infrequently witnessed in man and beast. Blumenbach regarded monstrosities as due to a failure of what he called the 7tisus /or/nativi/s, or the formative power. In theoiy he was right—but Blumenbach knew not in what or whence this power, or force, originated. The great sympathetic nerve—the ganglionic ners'ous system—was a terra incognita to him and his compeers; and so were the effects of partial arrests, or obstructions, in the cell structure (ganglia) engaged in the