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The Anatomy and Physiology of the Human Body, Volume 2
The Anatomy and Physiology of the Human Body Volume 2 Author:John Bell, Charles Bell Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: cry for a fuller breath ; and if a rash person tie the cord prematurely, when the child neither cries nor breathes, he cuts off the function of the placenta befo... more »re the function of the lungs is established, and often the child is lost: this, in the hurry and officiousness of ignorant women, happens every day. If even after two days the child's breathing be much interrupted by coughing, crying, or any spasmodic affection of the lungs, Nature seeks again the function of the placenta, and the pulse returns into the cord so as to raise it from the belly of the child. These things prove what the best physiologists have sometimes forgotten, that the foetus has, in the function of the placenta, something equivalent to the function of the lungs. One great mistake then runs through the whole of physiology. It has been universally believed that the free and easy transmission of the blood was the chief use of the lungs, as if they had acted like fanners to flap on the Wood from the right to the left side of the heart. They affirmed, that either continued distension or continued collapse hindered the progress of the blood ; and they also believed universally, that if but the ductus arteriosus or foramen ovale, or any thing, in short, were left open to let the blood pass, that person may live in spite of hanging, drowning, or suffocation of any kind. This will be found to be the most perfect of all absurdities ; and to allege such a thing against authors requires some kind of proof: it will suffice, if I prove it against a few of the most eminent. So much were the older authors wedded to this misapprehension of the dilatation of the lungs being useful only by driving forwards the blood, that, in the Parisian dissections, we find the following experiment made on purpose to prove the fact. ...« less