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
I think that physiologists have not paid sufficient attention, either
as it respects the bronchia or the skin, to the part which can be
evaporated, and to that which cannot. Some animals seem to throw out
more of these principles that cannot be evaporated, than man; hence
why it is necessary to curry horses every day, and even to bathe them
often, in order to cleanse their skins which the air would leave dirty.
Fourcroy and Vauquelin have remarked that there is never phosphate of
lime in the urine of these animals; this substance appears to pass out
with the sweat, and to be chrystalized on the surface of the skin, from
which it is removed by friction and water. I can hardly conceive how
the hairs can be the emunctories of it; it appears to me to be more
natural to think from analogy, that it is by the sweat that it escapes.
I presume that the rain, in the natural state is as necessary to these
animals as to plants. The first do not avoid it; many even expose
themselves to it; it serves as a bath for them, removes the saline
particles the air does not dissolve, and washes the skin.
The cutaneous exhalants do not appear to be everywhere equally
abundant. The face and chest contain many of them; we sweat easily in
these places. On the back and the extremities they are less numerous.
It is rare that we sweat on the palms of the hands and the soles of the
feet. Besides this varies remarkably in different individuals. I know
two sisters, belonging to a family in which phthisis has been frequent,
whose chests are however well formed, and who have never had any sign
of an affection of the lungs, and yet when they are warm they always
sweat from the chest. We know that in some the sweat appears most
usually in the face, and in others on the cranium.
Have the nerves any influence upon the cutaneous exhalation? In many
cases of paralysis, the patients sweat from the sound side. I have
attended, for two months past, a man at the Hôtel Dieu, who after
an apoplexy, had hemiplegia so that the left side of the body was
immoveable, and who only sweats from this side, so that an evident line
of demarcation is visible the whole length of the median line. On one
side the skin is dry, and on the other it is very moist. I know cases
are related in which opposite phenomena have taken place; but they do
not destroy the observation that is uniformly made, that the sweat
takes place equally upon the sound and the diseased side. Besides, who
does not know that when the nervous action is annihilated in a limb,
a blister acts upon it as usual? Do convulsions, in which the nervous
action is so much raised, increase cutaneous exhalation? Have the
states of extreme sensibility, in which all the cutaneous nerves are
so susceptible of receiving all impressions, the least known influence
upon sweating? Let us acknowledge then that in cutaneous exhalation, as
in secretion, we know nothing of the nature of the nervous influence,
if it does exist.
_Sebaceous Glands._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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