General Anatomy, Applied to Physiology and Medicine, Vol. 3 (of 3)Bichat, Xavier
Science
General Anatomy, Applied to Physiology and Medicine, Vol. 3 (of 3)
Bichat, Xavier
Human anatomy; Human physiology
When boiled, the glandular texture furnishes in the first moments of
ebullition, a great quantity of grey substance, which mixes at first
perfectly with the water which it renders turbid and then collects
into a copious scum on the top of this fluid. It is this texture,
the fleshy, the mucous and the cellular which give the most scum in
boiling, as it is the cartilaginous, the tendinous, the aponeurotic,
the fibro-cartilaginous, &c. which give the least of it. It should not
be believed, moreover, that this first product of stewing is uniform in
its nature; it varies in each system in quality as well as quantity. At
least I have observed that its appearance is never the same, that it
has nothing constant but its frothy state, which also varies much and
which is even almost always nothing in the mucous system.
The liquor which results from the boiling is very much changed in
colour, and appears to contain many more principles than that made with
the white organs. An accurate analysis of the liquor in which each
system had been boiled would be an interesting subject of research. I
have found that in almost all the appearance, the taste and the colour
were different.
The glands exhibit a phenomenon when cooking that especially
distinguishes them. They harden at the moment of the first ebullition,
and acquire the horny hardness like all the other systems; but whilst
most of these soften again from long-continued stewing, so as to become
pulpy, the glands uniformly become harder, so that after five or six
hours boiling, they are three or four times as hard as they naturally
are. I have very often made this experiment, which is also well known
in our kitchens, in which when a gland is cooked, care is taken that
the stewing should not continue too long. Beef kidney finally becomes
soft; those of sheep and of man remain hard for a much longer time.
They soften however more than the texture of the liver, which is of all
the glands that which exhibits the hardness in the greatest degree.
Another phenomenon which especially distinguishes the ebullition of
the glandular system, is that when it is taken out at the moment
it has undergone the sudden horny hardening, common to almost all
the animal solids plunged into boiling water, it has not like the
others acquired elasticity. Draw in an opposite direction a tendon, a
serous or mucous membrane or a muscle that have undergone the horny
hardening, they stretch and afterwards suddenly contract the instant
the extension ceases; on the contrary, a slice of liver that has the
horny hardness breaks when it is drawn and never contracts. The texture
of the prostate appears to be more capable of then acquiring a little
elasticity. The non-fibrous disposition of the glands seems to have
much influence upon this phenomenon.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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