On stethometry : being an account of a new and more exact method of measuring & examining the chest, with some of its results in physiology and practical medicine : also an appendix on the chemical and microscopical examination of respired air / by Arthur Ransome.

Date:
1876
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On stethometry : being an account of a new and more exact method of measuring & examining the chest, with some of its results in physiology and practical medicine : also an appendix on the chemical and microscopical examination of respired air / by Arthur Ransome. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

    203/228 (page 187)
    ON THE NATURE AND QUANTITY OF THE ORGANIC MATTER CONTAINED IN RE- SPIRED AIR. It has long been known that other substances besides gas£S and watery vapour are exhaled from the lungs. The contamination of the breath by alcoholic drinks or volatile oils from such foods as garlic and onions would be suffi- cient to prove this. Careful experiments also on the subject have been made by Nysten, Orfila, Magendie, Milne Edwards, and Tiedeman. These obsei-vers found that such substances as camphor, phosphorus, musk and garlic, when injected into the veins, appeared in the breath almost instantaneously. Tiedeman infers from these facts that the lungs act as a genuine excretory organ for the venous blood, that volatile unassimilable substances, which have been con- veyed into the blood from the food, which cannot serve in forming arterial blood, and are capable of evaporation, are thrown off in the cells and bronchi of the lungs, and removed with the expired air. In all probability also the quality of the matter given off varies at different ages, in various diseases, and even at different periods of the day. Thus fasting breath is often