General Anatomy, Applied to Physiology and Medicine, Vol. 2 (of 3)Bichat, Xavier
Science
General Anatomy, Applied to Physiology and Medicine, Vol. 2 (of 3)
Bichat, Xavier
Human anatomy; Human physiology
1st. Every living and organized being, both animal and vegetable, has
a temperature of its own. 2d. This temperature is nearly the same
in all ages in animals. 3d. It is entirely independent of that of
the atmosphere; it remains the same in a warm as in a colder medium.
4th. Caloric is often disengaged in health more abundantly in some
parts than in others. 5th. In inflammation there is evidently a more
considerable extrication of it. 6th. The vital forces, especially the
tonic power, have a very decided influence upon the extrication of
caloric. 7th. Each organ has its own temperature, and it is from all
these partial temperatures, that the general one arises. 8th. There
is oftentimes an immediate connexion between the respiratory and
circulatory phenomena, and those of the production of heat; the first
increasing, the second increase also in proportion. At other times this
relation does not exist.
If, below these phenomena, you place the theory of Lavoisier, Crawford,
&c. I do not believe you can make it accord with them, and conceive how
caloric, disengaged in the pulmonary capillary system can be spread,
as they say, through the whole animal economy. By admitting on the
contrary that this fluid is disengaged in the general capillary system,
it is easily understood. But let us explain this way of understanding
the production of animal heat.
The blood draws from two principal sources the substances that repair
the losses it has sustained. These sources are, 1st, digestion; 2d,
respiration; the first pours chyle into the blood, the other mixes
it with different aerial principles. Sometimes cutaneous absorption
introduces into it different substances. The mixture of the blood with
the new substances it receives, constitutes sanguification. Now these
new substances carry continually into this fluid, new caloric; for as
all bodies are penetrated by it, there can hardly be an addition of
a substance to the blood, without the addition of this principle. In
sanguification, caloric combines then with the blood, but it is not in
a free state; it becomes part of the fluid; it is one of its elements.
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