Lung Air Cells.  -- Each air cell varies in size from the seventieth to the one two-hundredth parts of an inch in diameter.  The number of aerosols in the two lungs is truly surprising, they're been certainly not less than 600,000,000, though according to Dr. Addison's computation there are 1,700,000,000, equivalent to 1,500 square feet of surface on which the process of purifying the blood is constantly in continuously going on in a healthy lung.

_____________________ The book doesn't mention who Dr. Addison is or how he reached his computation, a hundred years later these numbers seem highly questionable if for no other reason than they are not supported, there's no footnote in the book, there's no mention of who Dr. Addison is or what he's done or why his numbers should be considered.  There's no mention of who came up with the original numbers that Dr. Addison's numbers seem to refute. Also I've referenced the diagrams from chart 2, this includes three images of the lungs diagrammed and you can compare those to modern-day diagrams of the lungs from a Google image search.

Additional Articles from the Book of Medicine:

• Lead Palsy
  
  

  Lead Palsy. — under some special circumstances, not at present well understood, extremely minute amounts of lead in water may prove injurious. Thus, for example, Dr. Angus Smith speaks of cases in which lead paralysis, or palsy, was apparently produced by water containing only 1/100TH of a grain of lead to the gallon.

  I’d like to veer off the topic of lead poisoning for a second and just meditate on the fact that until I engaged in reading this section of the book, I had not taken the time to learn the definition of ‘palsy’

  Is is actually an alternative to the word paralysis, and might even be a slang term or abbreviated version of the word.  My own apathetic ignorance as it relates to this word, which to my ears in 2008 even sounds a little politically incorrect, speaks to a decrease in the threat of cerebral palsy even though paralysis (palsy) is still a real problem as a result of injuries.  I might be more in tune with seeking a car insurance quote than fearing for the potential of developing palsy as a result of lead poisoning.

• The Kidneys
  
  

  The Kidneys.– The kidneys are two glandular bodies, having for their functions the secretion of urine.  The form of the kidney resembles a French bean; its average length team from four to four and a half inches, two inches in breadth and one in thickness.  The two kidneys are situated one on each side of the spine and the lumbar region, opposite the last two dorsal and two first lumbar vertebrae; they are a brownish-read color flattened from before word, and grooved on the anterior border for the reception of the great vessels.

  _____________________

  I do not know what a French bean looks like, but I suspect people to read the book 100 years ago probably did.  I suppose this is some sort of reference point is lost its way over the years even though I’m sure there are a few people that knows what this still is.  This book was written to be a common reference for the everyday person hundred years ago, but it probably would not connect home with everyday people in the current century.  There are a number of ways to look at this, but it is important to remember that a reference that can be understood is very important when you’re trying to help somebody possibly save their life or prevent further injury, if you give a reference to medical supplies describing what they look like and where they should be located, but the person that you tell doesn’t understand what you’re saying it could be the difference between life and death.  That said, this is more of an anatomy lesson and it is doubtful that the average person really needed to know what the kidneys look like in a human person.  This was probably more beneficial for a person that might actually consider studying it as an in depth later on down the road.

• The Ovaries
  
  

  The Ovaries.– The organs are situated contiguously to the womb. They signify eggs from their shape, and they are the parts which the male semen acts upon to produce the phenomenon of pregnancy. They are in large eye inflammation in their passage down the fallopian tubes, once a month during the middle. A female life, produces the condition familiarly known as menstruation. The plate also affords another view of the vagina.

  And that is a pretty short paragraph to describe the process of reproduction. I believe it would be difficult to describe this process any more succinctly or with any less detail especially a medical textbook. It’s with short descriptions like this, that I wonder how on the world the author ever manage to squeeze 1700 pages out of a medical textbook.

  Sometimes I wonder if the short nondescriptive descriptions might have been more prevalent a hundred years ago and possibly super prevalent even further back. Maybe there was something lingering in the human psyche from the days when monks transcribed books by hand that led authors to avoiding words. If it wasn’t for this author’s ability to spot on with a lot of gibberish whenever he feels like it, I might suspect such a thing. The fact that the author did not use a lot of language here leads me to believe that the author was avoiding the topic.

  If ancient authors and written descriptions about to sail from Europe to India across the ocean in a similar style, it is no wonder that Columbus ended up only making it half way there suffering through a number of endless caribbean cruises before making landfall.

  My point is that as you go back in time and read writing that was written years and years and years ago different things seem important. Different subjective requirements come in to play in the writing and in the reading. The lack of objectivity leaves future readers at a loss for the detail that they need to make heads or tails out of text and information. It’s an important example of why the objectivity is important in writing scientific information. The subject of writing is also important in the two can be balanced what they need to be labeled such that future readers will understand those items that were understood to be fact as opposed to those items that were still under speculation.