On the pathology and treatment of acute rheumatism : being the Lumleian lectures delivered before the Royal College of Physicians in 1853 / by James Alderson.

  • Alderson, James, 1795-1882.
Date:
1853
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the pathology and treatment of acute rheumatism : being the Lumleian lectures delivered before the Royal College of Physicians in 1853 / by James Alderson. 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.

    30/114 (page 24)
    vitality; too exalted perhaps for the offices which it has to perform. We have now to refer to the process which takes place during the abstraction of heat through the conducting power of a cold and moist atmospliere, suddenly applied to the surface of the body. It is apparent that fibrine and albumen, not being found in the various secretions of the body during health, must, in the normal state, be expended in the processes of nutrition, which processes take place in the capillary system, by virtue of a power there resident, to assimilate these constituents of the blood: when these processes are interfered with by the ab- straction of heat at the surface, and by the constrict- ing effects of cold on the extreme vessels, fibrinated blood then passes through vessels, the cells of whose capillary network ought to be employed in selecting and assimilating the nutritive parts of the blood; those vessels then permit the blood to pass through them and thus fibrine in excess, unconsumed in the peripheral system, is transmitted to the veins. So far upon the action of cold on the surface. We have already seen, that chemically-excited oxygen applied to the extreme vessels of the lungs produces fibrine (a mere chemical act): we have also seen, that by the stoppage of the processes of nutrition, this fibrinated blood is passed by the extreme vessels into the veins and so to the heart: that the presence of this fibrinated blood stimulates the heart to undue