Vital motion as a mode of physical motion.

  • Radcliffe, Charles Bland, 1822-1889.
Date:
1882
Catalogue details

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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    been any such interval at death the body must then have collapsed and fallen down as it did do when the time came for cadaveric rigidity to give place to putrefactive limpness. At first I was much perplexed. Afterwards, by slow degrees, I became convinced—that a radical change was necessary in the doctrine of vital motion,—that the interpretation of spasm was to be sought, not on the side of life, but on that of death,— that spasm and rigor mortis were to be regarded, not as signs of vital action in certain vital properties of contractility, but as physical phenomena akin to, if not identical with, the return of an elastic body from a pre- vious state of extension,—that muscular contraction in all its forms might be the simple consequence of the operation of the natural attractive force or forces in- herent in the physical constitution of the muscular molecules,—that life is concerned in antagonizing con- traction rather than in causing it,—that this antagonizing influence might be electrical in its nature,—that, in short, vital motion might have to be regarded as a mode of physical motion. And yet more did this conviction grow in strength on the food supplied by two other facts to which my attention was called at a later period. Of these two facts the first was brought to light in an epileptic patient in whom it had been thought expe- dient to try and cut short a succession of very violent convulsions by taking blood from the temporal artery. The artery was divided when the fit was at his height, and the blood escaped by jets in the usual way, but not of the usual colour. Instead of being red, the blood