Popular Physiology; Being a Familiar Explanation of the Most Interesting Facts Connected with the Structure and Functions of Animals and Particularly of Man  (English, Paperback, Lord Perceval B)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1839. Excerpt: ... sible. We are, however, only upon the threshold of this inquiry of surpassing interest. It only remains, to conclude this chapter, that we should say a word of what is called the great sympathetic nerve. This has properly neither beginning nor ending: it resembles none of the nerves of which we have hitherto been speaking, and which can all be shown to originate at some determinate place, either of the brain, or spinal marrow. The sympathetic, on the contrary, seems to spring up, as it were, everywhere: and to be, in fact, a collection of ganglia united together by innumerable nervous filaments, and sending out others to all the organs found in the great cavities of the chest and abdomen, and generally known by the appropriate term of vital. In fact, wherever an ordinary nerve comes off from the spinal marrow, there the sympathetic is sure to have a distinct filament sent to it also (see last plate); insomuch, that Le Gallois concludes it to arise from all the spinal marrow. The filament, in the first instanoe, runs into one of these small collections of gray brain-like matter termed a ganglion, and it is here that it becomes, as it were, incorporated with the other filaments of the sympathetic system, and endued with its peculiar properties. It was at one time thought that ganglia were peculiar to this nerve, whence it was supposed that they might be so many centres for combining the actions and feelings of the different parts which derived nerves from this source, and thus being the means of producing sympathy, the name of sympathetic was given to the entire system. Bichat even went so far as to consider it a distinct system, and quite independent of the other, or cerebro-spinal system. The latter, he supposed to be the centre of animal life; that life...