A History of Science, vol 4, Henry Smith Williams [best books to read in life txt] 📗
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of a certain part of an artery, this enlargement sometimes
becoming of enormous size, full of palpitating blood, and likely
to rupture with fatal results at any time. If by any means the
blood can be allowed to remain quiet for even a few hours in this
aneurism it will form a clot, contract, and finally be absorbed
and disappear without any evil results. The problem of keeping
the blood quiet, with the heart continually driving it through
the vessel, is not a simple one, and in Hunter’s time was
considered so insurmountable that some surgeons advocated
amputation of any member having an aneurism, while others cut
down upon the tumor itself and attempted to tie off the artery
above and below. The first of these operations maimed the patient
for life, while the second was likely to prove fatal.
In pondering over what he had learned about collateral
circulation and the time required for it to become fully
established, Hunter conceived the idea that if the blood-supply
was cut off from above the aneurism, thus temporarily preventing
the ceaseless pulsations from the heart, this blood would
coagulate and form a clot before the collateral circulation could
become established or could affect it. The patient upon whom he
performed his now celebrated operation was afflicted with a
popliteal aneurism—that is, the aneurism was located on the
large popliteal artery just behind the knee-joint. Hunter,
therefore, tied off the femoral, or main supplying artery in the
thigh, a little distance above the aneurism. The operation was
entirely successful, and in six weeks’ time the patient was able
to leave the hospital, and with two sound limbs. Naturally the
simplicity and success of this operation aroused the attention of
Europe, and, alone, would have made the name of Hunter immortal
in the annals of surgery. The operation has ever since been
called the “Hunterian” operation for aneurism, but there is
reason to believe that Dominique Anel (born about 1679) performed
a somewhat similar operation several years earlier. It is
probable, however, that Hunter had never heard of this work of
Anel, and that his operation was the outcome of his own
independent reasoning from the facts he had learned about
collateral circulation. Furthermore, Hunter’s mode of operation
was a much better one than Anel’s, and, while Anel’s must claim
priority, the credit of making it widely known will always be
Hunter’s.
The great services of Hunter were recognized both at home and
abroad, and honors and positions of honor and responsibility were
given him. In 1776 he was appointed surgeon-extraordinary to the
king; in 1783 he was elected a member of the Royal Society of
Medicine and of the Royal Academy of Surgery at Paris; in 1786 he
became deputy surgeon-general of the army; and in 1790 he was
appointed surgeon-general and inspector-general of hospitals. All
these positions he filled with credit, and he was actively
engaged in his tireless pursuit of knowledge and in discharging
his many duties when in October, 1793, he was stricken while
addressing some colleagues, and fell dead in the arms of a
fellow-physician.
LAZZARO SPALLANZANIHunter’s great rival among contemporary physiologists was the
Italian Lazzaro Spallanzani (1729-1799), one of the most
picturesque figures in the history of science. He was not
educated either as a scientist or physician, devoting, himself at
first to philosophy and the languages, afterwards studying law,
and later taking orders. But he was a keen observer of nature and
of a questioning and investigating mind, so that he is remembered
now chiefly for his discoveries and investigations in the
biological sciences. One important demonstration was his
controversion of the theory of abiogenesis, or “spontaneous
generation,” as propounded by Needham and Buffon. At the time of
Needham’s experiments it had long been observed that when animal
or vegetable matter had lain in water for a little time—long
enough for it to begin to undergo decomposition—the water became
filled with microscopic creatures, the “infusoria animalculis.”
This would tend to show, either that the water or the animal or
vegetable substance contained the “germs” of these minute
organisms, or else that they were generated spontaneously. It was
known that boiling killed these animalcules, and Needham agreed,
therefore, that if he first heated the meat or vegetables, and
also the water containing them, and then placed them in
hermetically scaled jars—if he did this, and still the
animalcules made their appearance, it would be proof-positive
that they had been generated spontaneously. Accordingly be made
numerous experiments, always with the same results—that after a
few days the water was found to swarm with the microscopic
creatures. The thing seemed proven beyond question—providing, of
course, that there had been no slips in the experiments.
But Abbe Spallanzani thought that he detected such slips in
Needham’s experiment. The possibility of such slips might come
in several ways: the contents of the jar might not have been
boiled for a sufficient length of time to kill all the germs, or
the air might not have been excluded completely by the sealing
process. To cover both these contingencies, Spallanzani first
hermetically sealed the glass vessels and then boiled them for
three-quarters of an hour. Under these circumstances no
animalcules ever made their appearance—a conclusive
demonstration that rendered Needham’s grounds for his theory at
once untenable.[2]
Allied to these studies of spontaneous generation were
Spallanzani’s experiments and observations on the physiological
processes of generation among higher animals. He experimented
with frogs, tortoises, and dogs; and settled beyond question the
function of the ovum and spermatozoon. Unfortunately he
misinterpreted the part played by the spermatozoa in believing
that their surrounding fluid was equally active in the
fertilizing process, and it was not until some forty years later
(1824) that Dumas corrected this error.
THE CHEMICAL THEORY OF DIGESTIONAmong the most interesting researches of Spallanzani were his
experiments to prove that digestion, as carried on in the
stomach, is a chemical process. In this he demonstrated, as Rene
Reaumur had attempted to demonstrate, that digestion could be
carried on outside the walls of the stomach as an ordinary
chemical reaction, using the gastric juice as the reagent for
performing the experiment. The question as to whether the stomach
acted as a grinding or triturating organ, rather than as a
receptacle for chemical action, had been settled by Reaumur and
was no longer a question of general dispute. Reaumur had
demonstrated conclusively that digestion would take place in the
stomach in the same manner and the same time if the substance to
be digested was protected from the peristalic movements of the
stomach and subjected to the action of the gastric juice only. He
did this by introducing the substances to be digested into the
stomach in tubes, and thus protected so that while the juices of
the stomach could act upon them freely they would not be affected
by any movements of the organ.
Following up these experiments, he attempted to show that
digestion could take place outside the body as well as in it, as
it certainly should if it were a purely chemical process. He
collected quantities of gastric juice, and placing it in suitable
vessels containing crushed grain or flesh, kept the mixture at
about the temperature of the body for several hours. After
repeated experiments of this kind, apparently conducted with
great care, Reaumur reached the conclusion that “the gastric
juice has no more effect out of the living body in dissolving or
digesting the food than water, mucilage, milk, or any other bland
fluid.”[3] Just why all of these experiments failed to
demonstrate a fact so simple does not appear; but to Spallanzani,
at least, they were by no means conclusive, and he proceeded to
elaborate upon the experiments of Reaumur. He made his
experiments in scaled tubes exposed to a certain degree of heat,
and showed conclusively that the chemical process does go on,
even when the food and gastric juice are removed from their
natural environment in the stomach. In this he was opposed by
many physiologists, among them John Hunter, but the truth of his
demonstrations could not be shaken, and in later years we find
Hunter himself completing Spallanzani’s experiments by his
studies of the post-mortem action of the gastric juice upon the
stomach walls.
That Spallanzani’s and Hunter’s theories of the action of the
gastric juice were not at once universally accepted is shown by
an essay written by a learned physician in 1834. In speaking of
some of Spallanzani’s demonstrations, he writes: “In some of the
experiments, in order to give the flesh or grains steeped in the
gastric juice the same temperature with the body, the phials were
introduced under the armpits. But this is not a fair mode of
ascertaining the effects of the gastric juice out of the body;
for the influence which life may be supposed to have on the
solution of the food would be secured in this case. The
affinities connected with life would extend to substances in
contact with any part of the system: substances placed under the
armpits are not placed at least in the same circumstances with
those unconnected with a living animal.” But just how this writer
reaches the conclusion that “the experiments of Reaumur and
Spallanzani give no evidence that the gastric juice has any
peculiar influence more than water or any other bland fluid in
digesting the food”[4] is difficult to understand.
The concluding touches were given to the new theory of digestion
by John Hunter, who, as we have seen, at first opposed
Spallanzani, but who finally became an ardent champion of the
chemical theory. Hunter now carried Spallanzani’s experiments
further and proved the action of the digestive fluids after
death. For many years anatomists had been puzzled by pathological
lesion of the stomach, found post mortem, when no symptoms of any
disorder of the stomach had been evinced during life. Hunter
rightly conceived that these lesions were caused by the action of
the gastric juice, which, while unable to act upon the living
tissue, continued its action chemically after death, thus
digesting the walls of the stomach in which it had been formed.
And, as usual with his observations, be turned this discovery to
practical use in accounting for certain phenomena of digestion.
The following account of the stomach being digested after death
was written by Hunter at the desire of Sir John Pringle, when he
was president of the Royal Society, and the circumstance which
led to this is as follows: “I was opening, in his presence, the
body of a patient of his own, where the stomach was in part
dissolved, which appeared to him very unaccountable, as there had
been no previous symptom that could have led him to suspect any
disease in the stomach. I took that opportunity of giving him my
ideas respecting it, and told him that I had long been making
experiments on digestion, and considered this as one of the facts
which proved a converting power in the gastric juice… . There
are a great many powers in nature which the living principle does
not enable the animal matter, with which it is combined, to
resist—viz., the mechanical and most of the strongest chemical
solvents. It renders it, however, capable of resisting the powers
of fermentation, digestion, and perhaps several others, which are
well known to act on the same matter when deprived of the living
principle and entirely to decompose it. “
Hunter concludes his paper with the following paragraph: “These
appearances throw considerable light on the principle of
digestion, and show that it is neither a mechanical power, nor
contractions of the stomach, nor heat, but something secreted in
the coats of the stomach, and thrown into its cavity, which there
animalizes the food or assimilates it to the nature of the blood.
The power of this juice is confined or limited
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