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
The organic properties of the skin are also frequently put into action
by sympathies. The sweat on the skin is suppressed in a moment, if a
cold body is taken into the stomach. The entrance of teas into this
viscus, and an increased cutaneous exhalation, are two phenomena that
take place almost at the same instant; so that we cannot refer the
second to the absorption of the drink, then to its passage into the
black blood through the lungs, and afterwards into the red blood. The
production of sweat is then here analogous to its suppression in the
preceding case; it resembles that of fear, and that of phthisis in
which the lungs being affected act upon the skin. Shall I speak of
the innumerable varieties of this organ in diseases, of its dryness,
its moisture, its copious sweats, &c. phenomena for the most part
sympathetic, and which arise from the relations which connect this
sound organ with the diseased parts? I have pointed out those which
exist between it and the mucous surfaces. The membrane of the stomach
is the one with which it especially sympathizes. The digestive
phenomena are a proof of this. It would be necessary to treat of all
diseases in order to speak of the sympathetic influences exerted upon
the skin. These influences are often chronic. How in many organic
diseases, do different tumours form upon the skin? Precisely as
petechiæ, miliary eruptions, &c. are produced in acute fevers; the
difference is only in the duration of the sympathetic phenomena.
Animal and sensible organic contractility cannot be evidently put into
action in the passive sympathies of the skin, since it is not endowed
with these properties.
_Active Sympathies._
The four classes of cutaneous affections of which we have spoken,
occasion many sympathetic phenomena, the following are some of them.
1st. Whenever the papillæ are strongly excited, as in the tickling
of very sensitive people, various organs feel it sympathetically;
sometimes it is the heart; hence the syncopes that then take place;
sometimes it is the stomach; thus I knew two persons who could be made
to vomit by tickling them; sometimes it is the brain, as when in very
irritable people, tickling is carried so far as to produce convulsions,
which is not very rare in nervous women. Who is ignorant of the
influence which the organs of generation receive from the skin, when
stimulated in different parts?
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