The nerves : their influence and importance in health and disease a contribution to popular physiology / by Sir George Lefevre.

  • Lefevre, George William, 1798-1846.
Date:
[1844]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The nerves : their influence and importance in health and disease a contribution to popular physiology / by Sir George Lefevre. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    the pregnant woman, although she may enjoy the best of health during the whole period of gestation. It is asserted by those even who strenuously main- tain the vitality of the blood, that the red particles and fibrine alone enjoy this advantage, which is denied to the serum; yet the latter is as essential to the con- stitution of the blood as either of the former; for when the serum is expressed from them, what becomes of their vitality ? Extraneous, adventitious matters may be mixed'SAith the blood, but they do not stand in the same relation to it as the serum, which is part and parcel of it. If the blood be vital, it is so throughout; but we lean to the opinion that it borrows its vitality from juxtaposition with the vital solids, as iron becomes magnetic within a certain distance of the magnet. It may be wasted to almost any amount, and be reproduced by the nervous power working upon fresh materials. The delicately framed partmlent woman, whose requiem was all but sung (life having seemed to ebb away), shall rise triumphant from her couch, when the prick of a thorn or splinter, injuring a nerve, shall prostrate the athlete not to rise again. The blood holds a most important place amongst the vital organs, if it can usurp this title, but it does not hold the first place. To it the muscle owes its power, the nerve its tone; from it aU the secretions are prepared; but it doea nothing of itself; all depends upon its vitality, wliieh it derives from the nerves.