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.

    7/86
    PEEFACE. The work now given to my professional brethren com- prises a connected and somewhat extended view of ideas and inductions that passed through my mind many years ago, and that were communicated at the time in fragmentary portions, and with less of development than I have always thought their importance required. I am no longer content to allow views which I believe to have been novel when they were enunciated, and which to the best of my knowledge and belief have not yet been seen either by physiologists or pathologists in the important light in which they still meet me, to lie buried in foot-notes and among the miscellaneous contributions of other writers in the pages of a periodical publication. The -sdew I have taken of the function of the sudoriparous glands, and of the lymphatic system of vessels, I am bold enough to maintain embodies a new principle in physiology, which explains the origination of that force whereby the trans- ference of the fluids necessary to the nutrition and vital en- dowment of the living system from the efierent to the afferent channels of the circulation is efiected, and throws a suf- ficiently satisfactory light on many facts in the domain both of health and disease that still awaited interpretation. The facts upon which the inductions here presented in a connected series are based, have for the greater part—I might indeed say have all been long and familiarly known to phy- siologists ; but this is commonly enough the case as regards the .data which serve for the foundations of inductions that add most largely to the sum of human knowledge, and most essentially influence both the scientific and social progress of the world. The facts upon which Nicholas Copernicus founded his views of the Solar System were familiar enough to his predecessors and contemporaries. The facts upon which William Harvey raised his induction of the Circulation of the Blood were well Icnown