The human brain : its configuration, structure, development, and physiology : illustrated by references to the nervous system in the lower order of animals / by Samuel Solly.

Date:
1836
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The human brain : its configuration, structure, development, and physiology : illustrated by references to the nervous system in the lower order of animals / by Samuel Solly. 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.

    49/542 (page 27)
    And all true physiologists, even from the time of Aristotle, have observed more or less accu- rately the distinction between these two classes of phenomena, and arranged them accordingly. Aristotle conceived that they might be classified under three heads, vital, natural, and animal; the first two comprehending those which we now combine under the head of vegetable life. Galen adopted the same arrangement, but added the hypothesis that these functions were superintended or controled in their operation by presiding spirits; something in the same way that some physiologists of the present day believe in the existence of a single vital principle, whose office it is to effect all the various vital pheno- mena which are presented to our observation by living beings. Bichat arranged the functions, like many of his predecessors, under two heads; but instead of re- ferring the power, which appears to regulate and preside over these phenomena, to some mysterious spirit, he considered it to be dependent for its very existence on the nervous system; and this led him to divide the nervous material into two systems, the one of which he called the nervous system of organic, perhaps better called vegeta- tive life, and the other of animal life. The first of these systems used in man to be designated the sympathetic nerve, from a belief that it arose from the brain in a similar man-