A lecture on the physiology of digestion : introductory to a course of lectures on the Institutes of Medicine and Materia Medica : delivered before the medical class of the University of the City of New York, at the session of 1844-5 / by Martyn Paine.

  • Paine, Martyn, 1794-1877.
Date:
1844-5
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A lecture on the physiology of digestion : introductory to a course of lectures on the Institutes of Medicine and Materia Medica : delivered before the medical class of the University of the City of New York, at the session of 1844-5 / by Martyn Paine. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

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    to any transmutations the food may undergo ; and this inference is the more corroborated by the consideration that matter already in an or- ganic state must be better fitted for the process of vivification, than it can possibly be after its elements are broken up and recombined by forces with which those of life are in absolute opposition. Besides, the vitality of the gastric juice, or the vital influence of the stomach itself, being fully admitted, and even capable of organizing the food anew, this, in itself, should protect the alimentary matter against any chemi- cal agencies which have been supposed to operate. That this counteract- ing power, indeed, prevails to the full extent which I have alleged, ap- pears to be rendered certain by the ordinary absence of any of those chemical changes which take place where numerous substances are mixed together out of the stomach,—substances which often possess strong chemical affinities for each other, and whose operation within the stomach would be promoted by its high temperature. On the contrary, whatever the variety, it is uniformly resolved into one and the same homogeneous substance, utterly unlike the results of chemical reac- tions of one kind of food upon other kinds ; and what is also as conclu- sive as it is astonishing, the chyle is apparently the same substance in all animals. Chemistry must here be consistent with itself, and not renounce, for the sake of hypothesis, those precise laws by which, in its legitimate pursuit, it lays open, with astonishing exactness, what had appeared the arcana of nature. Here, too, upon the chemico-phy- siological hypothesis, is presented an instance in which it must be ne- cessarily assumed that the properties of life and the forces of chemis- try must act together in concert in converting dead into living matter, —one destroying, and at the same moment the other vitalizing ; whilst the assumption is contradicted by all that is known of the relation of these forces to each other. It will be also readily conceded that it is the demand of philosophy not to multiply causes, where one is perfectly adequate ; and especially where it is admitted that, all the others are of themselves wholly inade- quate. This remark may be also equally applied to a common assumption which is set forth in the following apparently plausible manner. The vitalists,'* says one of their opponents, are loth to admit the operation of chemical agents at all, and would seem to consider it derogatory to suppose that any changes, save the subtle ones effected by the powers of life, are worked upon the aliment. The vital principle, he says, whatever it may be, incessantly makes use of chemical and mechani- cal agents for its purposes ; and it is no more degrading to it to employ an acid liquid, and a triturating process, in order to digest the aliment than it was to have recourse to bony levers, cartilaginous pullevs and' tendonous ropes. Here, in the first place, you will observe an entire begging of the question as to digestion by an acid, since that has never been shown, and is the main point at issue. It is a perfectly unfounded and extor- ted inference from the factitious analogy supposed to be seen in the ad- mitted mechanical movement of the food in the stomach, bony levers cartilaginous pulleys, &c. But the pretended analogy, I say, is utter- ly inapplicable, were it admissible to reason from better premises of this nature to the existence of important facts which have no other