THE HEART AND ITS WONDERS.
What the Blood Is.-The blood -- the pabulum of life -- has not inaptly been termed "Liquid Flesh." But it is more than that, since it contains materials so essential and so requisite for the building up and repair of every organ tissue of which the body is composed. The blood is the liquid by means of which the circulation in the body is carried on; it permeates every note and corner of the system, and is composed of a pen, colorless fluid, the plasma, filled with red discs, so small, flat and thin that it requires 3,500, placed side by side, to measure 1 inch, and no less than 18,000, placed one upon the other, to make a column 1 inch in height. These discs are continually forming and as constantly dying.
This section started off very strange with the reference to liquid flash, I think the author would have been wise to describe her point out this reference. As were only 50 pages into the book, I have the suspicion that there are going to be many very peculiar quoted references to sources that we will never know.
Than the author goes into his rapture about the human body and emotions of being in awe of the blood. That was somewhat to be expected.
Then we got to something interesting as they started to talk about the red discs. I suspect he's referring to red blood cells, and the viewer perception that they were discs as they looked at it through a microscope. It probably didn't really know what they were looking at yet and they could only get a descriptive name.
Additional Articles from the Book of Medicine:
- How May Adults Remain Healthy?
How may adults Remain Healthy?-In this day and generation struggle for existence is becoming more and more complex, the occupations are more enacting and confining, exposure to accidents more frequent, due to modern machinery and it’s difficult handling. Competition in all lines is great and therefore more string is put upon the brain and nerves of man in all walks of life. This lead-in time to state of “overwork, closed quotes nervous frustration or worry, if the individual has not the physical strength to stand the battle or fails to keep himself in a normal state of body and mind by careful living. When the latter condition, man is a suitable soil for development of disease which makes short work of the rundown systems, and such a person when exposed to disease or accident is very apt to succumb about some reserve vitality comes to the aid of him or her in the physician or surgeon in attendance and the uneven battle for life.
Man can keep his health and thus prevent disease by insisting on getting the best and purest of foods, working in factories or shops, dairies, bonds, etc., which are well lighted and ventilated, free from dust, smoke, irritating vapors from paints, gases, assets, etc. By insisting upon regular working hours, eight hours sleep, dry and warm clothing of exposed during outdoor work, but not too warmly dressed for indoor work. To your coffee and moderation is not harmful light beers, Porter, Stout, ale; wines, as Sherry, port, claret, without strong preservatives or alcohol, except in small proportions, are not harmful and refresh and cheer the tired nerves. Whiskey, Brandy, cognac, Jin, except as medicine, are absolutely harmful and the whiskey with the government allows sold in this country is a disgrace and a poison. More and more corporations and his men are insisting on their employees abstaining from its use. It causes a sense of stimulation or well-being which is temporary and is soon followed by a sense of depression which can only be relayed by a renewal of the does and the stupid man continues to be temporarily stimulated, while the total effect of his imbibing is to lower his vitality, destroy his mind, I was judgment and render ambitious; Rudy’s appetite by the action up on his stomach, harden his liver and destroy his kidneys.
That section was a little preachy but it’s definitely interesting as it provides some insight into some of the concepts that went into the prohibition movement before laws were enacted to prohibit the sale and consumption of alcohol by the general population in the United States. I wonder how modern preventative concepts will hold up in 100 years such as The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch.
- Cause of Goitre
Cause of Goitre. — the swelling of the thyroid gland in the neck, producing the repulsive deformity of Goitre, or Derby Shire neck, seems to be intimately connected with mineral impurities and water. In Nottingham England, where this disease is not unfrequently met with, the common people attribute it to the hardness of the water, and in other parts of Great Britain is found to prevail only, or at least especially, in those districts where the magnesium limestone formation abounds.
Okay I have to admit that this time I had no idea what goiter was, or why it was spelled with what appears to be a French spelling. But I was curious and so I decided to look it up on Wikipedia. When I did this, I found thisdisturbing pictureof a woman with an extremely swollen neck.So as I look this up on Wikipedia, I learned that basically this disease occurs due to a lack of iodine. It’s not caused by the presence of chemicals as thought 100 years ago,but by the absenceof iodine in a person’s diet.
Today salt is commonly fortified with iodine, which helps to prevent the spread of this disease.
Here’s an interesting history on the treatment of goitre from Wikipedia, which might help with this and more perspective.
Chinese physicians of the Tang Dynasty (618–907) were the first to successfully treat patients with goiter by using the iodine-rich thyroid gland of animals such as sheep and pigs—in raw, pill, or powdered-mixture-in-wine form.[1] This was outlined in Zhen Quan’s (died 643 AD) book, as well as several others.[2] One Chinese book (i.e. The Pharmacopoeia of the Heavenly Husbandman) asserted that iodine-rich sargassum was used to treat goiter patients by the 1st century BC, but this book was written much later.[3]
In the 12th century, al-Jurjani, a Persian physician, provided the first description of Graves’ disease after noting the association of goitre and exophthalmos in his Thesaurus of the Shah of Khwarazm, the major medical dictionary of its time.[4][5] Al-Jurjani also established an association between goitre and palpitation.[6] The disease was later named after Irish doctor Robert James Graves,[7] who described a case of goiter with exophthalmos in 1835. The German Karl Adolph von Basedow also independently reported the same constellation of symptoms in 1840, while earlier reports of the disease were also published by the Italians Giuseppe Flajani and Antonio Giuseppe Testa, in 1802 and 1810 respectively,[8] and by the English physician Caleb Hillier Parry (a friend of Edward Jenner) in the late 18th century.[9]
Paracelsus (1493–1541) was the first person to propose a relationship between goitre and minerals (particularly lead) in drinking water.[10] Iodine was later discovered by Bernard Courtois in 1811 from seaweed ash.
Goitre was previously common in many areas that were deficient in iodine in the soil. For example, in the English Midlands, the condition was known as Derbyshire Neck. In the United States, goitre was found in the Great Lakes, Midwest, and Intermountain regions. The condition now is practically absent in affluent nations, where table salt is supplemented with iodine. However, it is still prevalent in India,[11] Central Asia and Central Africa.
Some health workers fear that a resurgence of goitre might occur because of the trend to use rock salt and/or sea salt, which has not been fortified with iodine. New research indicates that there may in fact be a tendency to inherit an increased vulnerability to goitre.
Interesting, but I’m glad we figured out the cause and the solution for this one. Next up, Viagra and acne cream,
just kidding seems like we’ve covered some of the more serious things over the last hundred years and now fiddling around with less serious things. - How is Malaria carried by the Mosquito
How is malaria carried by the mosquito?-best imagined that a man has returned from some malarial country takes up his abode in a healthy, yet mosquito infested village. This man may be fairly over his attack yet he still suffers from an occasional chill with fever. He has no screens in his house, nor have his neighbors, unless previously told to follow such cautions. A female as Cato are several attack in and stuck his blood which contains these tiny parasites. The mosquito takes millions of the little parasites which then undergo a development in the body of the insect and can be seen microscopically in the stomach and intestine, and the small glands in its mouth, which secrete saliva. Now let us follow the mosquito and see what harm it can cause any community. It flies through a screen door or window and lights on the arm, etc., of an unsuspecting neighbor. Inviting a person the mosquito ejects or gives off its saliva into the womb to eight in diluting the blood of a person which it has been, as the blood is too thick to be sucked up to the tiny tube in the bill (proboscis) of the mosquito. In this way the bite of the female mosquito whose body contains a small animal error sites which cause malaria, as by means of the saliva into the blood of the person during the act of sucking up the blood. Does the mosquito sucks up the blood of the individual and in exchange injects into his blood the saliva contains parasites. These parasites multiply in the blood of the person bitten and produce poisons which give rise to the chills, fever, aching limbs, etc., known as malaria, malarial fever or “odd,” (chills and fever). It can readily be seen how malaria will spread when individuals in the community have millions of parasites in the blood, and at the same time as Cato’s are carrying around in their bodies, millions of the same living germs which they sought from the blood of the infected person, develop and inject them into the blood of every person they bite.
You will notice as you read the follow on sections covering Mosquitos and Malaria that the book is big on talking about where they live, but not terribly practical on how to actually deal with the insects. There are more references to different possible breeding places than there are gears in a Patek Gondolo watch.
