Distilled Water. At the present day, most sea-going vessels are provided with apparatus for distilling the water of the ocean, and so producing a pure and wholesome but insipid water, which can be rendered, however, more palatable by agitation with plenty of fresh air. Hence, the horrible agony of death by thirst among sailors is now much less frequent than formerly, although mariners in open boats, or cast upon small uninhabited islands, still sometimes scan with anxious eyes the briny waste around them, beholding

"Water, water every where, but not a drop to drink."

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This article tells me something that I had never heard of before as they mention that sea going vessels at the turn of the last century had water distilling devices that they could use to generate water.  Today, we tend to think of swimming pools and home theater seating and tennis and buffets.  Definitely a difference in culture and technology and what you can do with it all.

Additional Articles from the Book of Medicine:

• Muscular Levers
  
  

  Muscular Levers.-These great muscular levers in the body forward on the thigh, and bring the legs inward toward each other, besides moving the whole body to and fro when walking, etc.  The long, narrow muscle, seen running bleakly across the thought, is the Sartorius muscle,  a so called from the fact that it crosses the legs for the sartorial (Tailor’s) posture.  It is the longest muscle in the body.

  When I attempted to look up the word ’sartorial’ in Wikipedia, I could find no reference for it.  I’m not exactly sure what a tailor’s posture looks like.  Maybe its a form of exercise and maybe its something that tailors used to employ when taking measurements years ago.  I’m not sure.  I can almost picture someone doing squats or leg lifts or something working with strength equipment to build up their muscles in some archaic way.

   

  All I could find, was something that referenced the tailor posture for child birth.

  

• Shape of Skull
  
  

  Bones Seen in the Plate — the bones of the skull observed in this beautiful plate are: the frontal, which forms the four head or front part of the skull; the parietal, constituting a portion of the side and top of the head; the occipital, forming the lower and back part of the skull, and the temporal, which forms the lowest part of the site any part of the base of the cranium. These several bones are joined together by notched seems, after the manner carpenters call “dove-tailing.”
  
  Shape of the Skull — the skull, as will be seen, is oval, which adapts it to the conformation of the brain, besides giving a greater resistance to pressure. The stronger and smaller and is in front, where danger is greatest to the brain, whilst the projections before and behind shield its less protected parks. The peculiar conformation and shape of the skull forms a strong shelter for the brain — an organ so delicate that if not so strongly guarded from injury, and ordinary blow falling upon it would destroy it forever.

  I find the description of the seems of the skull rather interesting. I am no doctor nor am I a carpenter, however the analogy of dovetailing strikes me as rather interesting. Upon looking at the picture in short one of the skull, I can distinguish get the impression that dovetailing might be an apt description. That does make me wonder how bones could be grown in a way that emulates dovetailing, however I suspect that it’s probably easier to grown organic substance in that manner than it is to join two pieces of wood by force into notched pieces and make them stick or hold in place. Maybe with the advances of nanotechnology and other areas of convergence and biotech we might actually see a day where actual dovetailing is performed with nanotechnology that grows itself into place.

  Can you imagine installing a tile floor or even a wood floor where instead of using grout or glue or a nail gun you activate a nano tech compound that remembers how to join itself and seal the seems of tile or would together?

  Don’t get me wrong I recognize that this would use a highly advanced technology to perform something that might actually emulate an old fashion way to cover a floor with tile or wood. It’s probably more likely by the time that we have got firmer grasp on nanotechnology that we may not have the Woods agreed a floor with and we may not have the desire to use tiles of floor covering opting instead for some more ergonomic substance that’s better for our feet and knees. I’m sure in a hundred years my comments will sound quaint and silly just like certain aspects of his books on plain silly to me today.

• The Neck Muscles
  
  

  The next section sets out the goal of covering the Neck Muscles. As the section of the book is describing an image, it shouldn’t be assumed that this will entail the full discourse on these areas of the body. It’s much more likely that this is a simple overview of these areas and more details will follow as there are 1600 more pages to go. So as we read this we should look at this as the simple summary introduction of the professional doctor attempting to describe the subject matter of the human body to a laywoman as the book is set out to educate wives and mothers in the arts of family nursing.

  The neck muscles — this beautiful illustration brings out in bold relief is superficial and deep muscles of the neck, and, at the same time, we observe a faithful to litigation, not only of the relative position of the carotid artery and jugular vein, but also of the manner in which muscular and fleshy part of the neck receives its nervous supply.

  This is a short section wrapping up the primary section titled “the brain; and a vertical section of the face and neck.” Again this one paragraph mention something that was referenced in the previous paragraph. It references the idea of the nervous supply. The section that contain information on the “view of the eye” went into slight detail about the supply of nerves to the teeth, “we see the dental nerve distributing its nervous supply to their individual and collective roots,” and then again we see the same description of a nervous supply here in the section, “and fleshy part of the neck receives its nervous supply.”

  This reference to the nervous supply seems to describe something more than just a system of nerves as it might be described day and hints that a conceptual difference possibly stemming from a lack of knowledge about what the nervous system actually dozer performs. Scientists of the day were not ignorant of the electrical connections in the nervous system and the analogies to the movement of current, as many experiments have been done on animals and other systems of the day to identify the cause-and-effect associated with putting occurrence to a nerve for a muscle. To a certain degree this appears to be a choice of semantics probably utilized by the editors as opposed to an actual medical view. However based on the context that is not entirely possible to confirm or ascertain.