Observations on the Cultivation of Organic Science; Being the Hunterian Oration Delivered February 14, 1848, Before the Royal College of Surgeons of England (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: and that so much mixed up with doubt and obscurity, that no useful generalizations could be established; and thus it happened that, until the discovery of the mam miferous ovum, one of the most important means of interpretation, inclosing such glorious truths, remained all but a sealed book. If from the anatomy we turn to the physiology of the epoch immediately preceding the establishment of Bell's great discovery, we shall find that although there was a large assemblage of most valuable facts, and likewise that several of the laws connected with the vital phenomena were more or less accurately determined, there was yet in many fundamental questions a large admixture of doubt and uncertainty. I must here again, in support of this assertion, confine myself to a single illustrative corroboration, that of the gastric juice. What were the organs for its secretion ? did these consist of the glands of the stomach, or of what were called the exhalent vessels ? was it, therefore, a glandular liquid or a perspired fluid ? was it acid, or alkaline, or neither one nor the other ? if acid, did the acidity depend on its inherent qualities, or on the acetous fermentation of certain kinds of aliment ? was it constantly poured out, or only when the stomach was excited by the presence of food ? These and similar questions were again and again proposed, but to them science gave in those days no certain response; and so it happened that although chemists had obtained and analysed the gastric secre tions, although anatomists had scrutinised the structure of the organ, and physiologists had even looked into the interior cf the living human stomach, all remained in obscurity and doubt till the admirable researches of Prout, Eberle, and Schwann, joined to the capital experiments of Beaumont, and the...