A report on the progress of anatomy and physiology in the year 1843-44 / by William Budd.

  • Budd, William, 1811-1880.
Date:
1844
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A report on the progress of anatomy and physiology in the year 1843-44 / by William Budd. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    necessary that the great process of combustion should incessantly go on. That the materials for this combustion are furnished directly by the blood; and that, as they consume away, they must be restored to the blood either by the food or, failing that source, by matter from the living tissues, which thereby suffer damage. That the art of nutrition consists, therefore, in protecting the tissues from this damage, by restoring to the blood, at the same rate in which they waste away, the materials of which this fluid is itself composed. Now, in protracted abstinence, there is no doubt that the tissues may suffer serious damage in this way. The general waste of the body in long illnesses, and also many forms of ulceration of the cornea and of cartilages, together with various destructions of parts resulting from habitually defective nutriment, are instances of this. It is equally certain that a large class of diseases, having no fixed place in our present systems of nosology, and now, through our ignorance of their true pathology, vaguely and variously classed in accordance with functional characters, or other principles still more general and undefined, will, eventually, be found to consist in abnormal destruction of tissue, by excessive action of oxygen, the great agent of change in the living economy, on parts whose vitality and power of resistance have been weakened by other causes. That this is the case with various forms of insanity and other obscure affections of the nervous centres, now referred to the vague heads of softening, atrophy, and other merely descriptive terms, admits already of complete demonstration. But, surely, M. Dumas cannot mean to maintain, that in the normal state of nutrition the tissues themselves suffer no change nor destruction. The doctrine generally received, and it seems to be one founded on the strictest induction, is, that in eveiy functional act, a part of their substance necessarily, and by the very fact, loses its vitality and suffers chemical change, in effect of the great process of oxidation incessantly going on. According to this doctrine, therefore, the blood is not, as Dumas assumes, drained of its albuminous principles in furnishing, dii-ectly, material for combustion, but in repairing the losses which the tissues suffer, in prey to this process, and of which, under this view, they, and not the blood, are, as far as these principles are concerned, the great feeders. But the truth will, probably, eventually prove to