On the special function of the sudoriparous and lymphatic systems : their vital import, and their bearing on health and disease / by Robert Willis.

  • Willis, Robert, 1799-1878.
Date:
1867
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the special function of the sudoriparous and lymphatic systems : their vital import, and their bearing on health and disease / by Robert Willis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    iindcv sucli peculiar circumstances, does not appear from the notice of his Memoir, read before the Royal Academy of Sciences of Paris, which has been given to the public.* I presume that he had not; for the Messrs Becquerel and Breschet,t on repeating the experiments of M. Fourcault, are found I’emarking particularly on the fact that the suppression of the cutaneous exhalation was immediately followed not by a rise, but by a signal fall, in the temperature of the animal operated on, and this not only as regards the surface, but the deeper internal parts of the body also—a fall that went on in- creasing every instant from the beginning of the experiment till life was extinct, when the body was found to be but a few degrees Centigrade higher in temperature than that of the surrounding air. Thus, in their first experiment, Messrs Breschet and Becquerel observed that a rabbit, prepared in the manner of M. Fourcault, whose internal temperature at first was 38° Cent., had fallen in half an hour to 32° Cent., and in an hour to 24'5° Cent. In their second experiment, * ComptGs Rendus des Seances de I’Academie Royale des Sciences, &c., tom. vi. p. 369. In tlie notice here given, of M. Fourcault’s first scries of experiments, I observe that he refers the remarkable phenomena he witnessed to impeded deration or oxygenation of the skin—‘ les vernis s’opposent a I’acration et peutetre a I’oxigenation de la peau.’ In the published account of his second series, M. Four- cault quits this ground, and now refers the implication of the vital functions that occurred to the retention within the body of lactio acid, a substance which we must therefoi’e presume he thinks it the special business of the skin to eliminate from the system. But there is not a single fact in the whole range of animal physics that permits us to connect aeration or oxygenation of the blood in man, mammalia, and birds, with the skin, or indeed with any other than the pulmonic system. With regard to lactic acid, again, the substance to which the natural acid reaction of the sweat has been ascribed by most physiologists, this appears to be present in all the fluids of the body, and like other hydrocarbons is easily decompoundable and even available as a heat-producer when brought into contact with the air in the course of the pulmonic circulation. And, then, from 96 to 99’5 per cent, of pure water does seem a needless expenditure of power to free the system from mere traces of a substance which when not in excess appears to be perfectly innocuous, if not more positively useful. I say when not in excess, as I bring to mind the experi- ments of one of the most ingenious and gifted among the physicians of our age. Dr B. W. Richardson, he having discovered that lactic acid introduced artificially into the bodies of some of the lower animals excited all the symptoms of acute rheu- matism as observed in the human subject. t Vide Comptes Rendus, tom. xiii. p. 791 c(scq.