An inquiry into the nature and causes of epilepsy : with the function of the spleen; and the use of the thyroid body ... / John Jackson.

  • Jackson, John, -1855.
Date:
1842
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An inquiry into the nature and causes of epilepsy : with the function of the spleen; and the use of the thyroid body ... / John Jackson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    they have not been eliminated in any process of secretion.—If indeed, the spleen were “ concerned in sanguification, or in the secretion of a lymph of peculiar nature, &c., which tends to perfect the for- mation of the chyle ”—why, in man, is it one-sixth of the weight of the liver, and in the quadruped only one-twelfth, one-fourteenth, or one-sixteenth ? If in man, the spleen weigh eight ounces, and the liver less than fifty,—why does the spleen of a hog weigh only four ounces and a quarter, when the liver weighs fifty-one? In an ox, the death of which was accidental and unattended by haemorrhage, the spleen weighed only eighteen ounces and a half, and the liver, exclusive of gall-bladder, &c., sixteen pounds and three-quarters—or fourteen times and a half heavier than the spleen. In this animal, the spleen, to have borne the same proportion to the liver as in man, ought to have been upwards of forty-four ounces. The opinion of Muller is not only unsupported by, but is evidently irreconcilable with, the foregoing facts ; the simple explanation, however, of which is, —that in man the usual attitude of the trunk is erect—in the quadruped horizontal; and that the former requires a spleen larger in comparison with the liver than the latter, because a greater power is necessary to propel the portal blood through a venous and capillary system the direction of which is vertical, than through one the direction of which is horizontal. Extirpation of the spleen has frequently been