Chapter 18

Living fluids

 

585. Today there is much discussion about the life of the fluids which circulate in animal bodies and account for eleven-twelfths of the weight of human bodies. What we have said may offer a solution to the question.

The following is clear:

1. These fluids can live with a feeling different from ours, of which we cannot be conscious.

2. It is not absurd to think that they, or a part of them, are terms of our own fundamental feeling of continuation. But granted that the sensitivity pertaining to our individuality is joined to their elements, not to their molecules, no stimulated feeling would arise from them. Because the fluids are pliable and there are no stimuli, the elements composing their molecules are not displaced. This explains the apparent absence of feeling in the fluids: their molecules themselves may rub against each other, but this does not imply similar friction between the elements which continues as far as the centre of human feeling.

586. I will use another author's words to present the reasoning that leads many learned people to acknowledge vital properties in these fluids. The fact, if verified, will confirm the theory that explains the fact. Adelon says:

 

Initially, vitality of the fluids was universally accepted. The reason was the rapidity with which the fluids corrupted when separated from the living body. - The theory also took for granted that every fluid was in continual intestine movement by which it maintained and renewed itself. For example, in haematosis, the blood acted analogously to a solid procuring its own nourishment.
Later, the Montpellier physiologists went further, and unhesitatingly placed vitality of the fluids in the sensibility by which all the solids of a body are said, by abstraction, to be animated. They based their theory on the following considerations:
1. A general instinct affirms that there is life in the blood: the principal actions of animal economy tend to the formation and renewal of this fluid. It is the substance which repairs the organs, and the continual stimulus necessary for their activity. With its loss, life ceases.
2. Certain substances introduced into the blood, even in small quantities, modify it with a rapidity too great to be attributed to chemical action, fermentation, putrefaction or the action of solids modified by these substances. We must admit therefore that these substances act directly on the vitality of the blood. Boerhaave and Van Swieten, for example, report that a little scammony immediately caused coagulation of the blood; Felice Fontana injected the vessels of a living animal with the venom of a viper and witnessed the animal's immediate death and coagulation of the blood, an effect not found in a dead animal. Similarly, in medical practice, we see that astringent, weakening and antiphlogistic drugs, even in small dozes, produce such immediate effects disproportionate to the dose that the only attribution possible for the effects is a direct action exercised on the vitality of the fluids. For example, a grain of nitro in a drink is very refreshing, yet the dose is so small that the effect cannot be physically explained. In the opinion of those who positively support this system, the vitality of the fluid has evidently been modified, and the part receiving the action has then defused the impression to the whole of the fluid. As proofs of this assertion, they note that Schulz and Benefeld stopped haemorrhages in other parts of the body by stiptic injections in the mouth, and that Fracassati injected a stiptic liquid into a dog's crural or jugular vein and saw all the blood coagulate immediately. They also base themselves on the authority of Treind, who attributes the power of resolvents to a direct action on the vitality of the fluids, and on the authority of Pringle who used this to explain the action of antiseptics which, he thought, forestalled the putrefaction of the blood by strengthening its vitality. According to Barthez, whose words we are quoting, all these facts seem to prove that there is consensus between the various parts of the fluids, which are therefore impregnated with life.
3. Affections of the soul modify the condition of the fluids; this fact cannot be contradicted. Boerhaave and Mathes observed that a nurse's milk was so altered by anger that the children she was nursing became epileptic. Anger often imparts to an animal's saliva the quality of transmitting rabies and of increasing the harmful strength of poison in venomous animals. Clearly, in all these cases, the fluids are affected so suddenly that the affection cannot be explained by the intervention of solids.
4. Observations seem to have demonstrated in the fluids conditions of temperature different from those in the rest of the body, and hence stemming from the vitality of the fluids. Hunter says he found that the blood's temperature differed from the body's; Borelli and Morgagni say that by blood-letting they have extracted totally cold but uncoagulated blood. Hewson and Dehaïn say that they have found blood to differ in colour, heat and density in different parts of the body
Finally, supporters of the vitality and sensibility of the fluids boost their system by saying they have sometimes seen, in health and in illness, the fluids share in the state of the solids. Thus, they note with Spiegel that in weak constitutions blood does not coagulate so easily, and mention that Stahl and Cullen claim to have seen blood become inflamed due to a general spasm, and that some epileptics have given a very liquid blood before, and a very dense blood during an attack.(286)

587. I am far from agreeing that there are corporeal substances separate from our body which, when applied to the body, immediately act on its vitality. In my opinion, body can act only on body; and a foreign body, as body, can act only on one's own body.
When our body, which is the term of feeling, is modified in this way, the feeling also must obviously be modified, increased, stimulated and even multiplied.(287) I have already suggested that the activity of the feeling whose term is the body could act directly on the feeling of the passive body.(288) The more I have observed the phenomena of animal nature, the more probable it seems to me that a living body has a double action on another living body, an action of matter and of feeling.

588. Indeed, according to the hypothesis, it is the feelings that unite and form a continuity when living molecules come into contact; it is the feelings that concentrate and individualise, and with their individuation make other feelings dependent on them, and govern the intestine movements of the continuum they pervade. Between these feelings there is sometimes harmonious, sometimes hostile interaction and communication.

589. Consequently, although the fluids of the animal body are insensible to the animal itself, they can be alive and invested with feeling as terms of the feeling of continuity, although their movements cannot stimulate feeling or produce sensation. Either their friction is not that of living elements, or the stimulation does not reach the centre where the seat of the all-pervading feeling is located. Alternatively, they can be terms of another feeling different from that of the animal to which they are thought to pertain.

The microscopic observations of blood globules by modern scientists seem to confirm that the fluids of the human body, or some of them, can be terms of another feeling. I quote a well known Italian doctor:

 

Gruithuisen found that blood globules of animals whose heart has been removed are the seat of a particular movement called 'oscillatory'; the movement really looks like an oscillation, as if all the blood were finding its balance. Haller observed something similar in dying animals when the impelling force of the heart diminishes or ceases. Döllinger saw the same in young animals when their substance was converted into blood. Moreover, Heidemann noticed a slow contraction in blood globules that makes them turn in on themselves. This happens when they come to rest. These movements cannot originate from the heart or the vessels; they are proper to blood itself, where they foreshadow the first manifestations of vital movement. They are the steps taken by nature to raise matter gradually to a more elaborate, organised composition and to greater vital properties.(289)

590. It is indeed strange to hear some who deny the life to the fluids and speak only of solidism in medicine. If they bore in mind that liquids existed before solids, they would not make this mistake. Liquids precede solids in the formation of nature and in the generation of animals. This fact further illustrates the very ancient principle, which characterised the Ionic school: 'Liquid is the principle of all things'. Moreover, we must not forget the numerous observations made about the successive formation of the animal:

 

The vescica proligera of the ovum contains a globular humour which on its own is incapable of the regular changes necessary for the formation of the foetus. But if a globule of the prolific male fluid is united to it, various reactions are immediately stimulated among all the globules and elements of the liquid containing them. At once the first rudiment of a seed is formed, to which other globules of the vescica proligera and of the vitelline fluid unite. These globules, which continue the same series of reciprocal reactions, decomposition and composition, begin to form a granulated, gelatinous substance. Continuation of the same process changes this substance into cellular tissue. Next, the vessels, whose purpose is to distribute the nutritional humour, begin to appear. After this, all the other tissues are constituted, and the different organs and viscera formed, as described by Wolff and our own Roland.(290)

591. The life of the liquids will also explain assimilation by nutrition and the reproduction of some parts of the body:

 

This is the only way that the reproduction of parts amputated or destroyed by illness takes place in higher animals and in human beings. The reproduction always begins with the exhalation of a watery liquid rich in globules hardly perceptible with the most powerful microscope. The liquid becomes gradually denser and changes into a granulated substance as a result of the metamorphosis undergone by both the organised globules and the liquid containing them. New globular liquid continues to exhale and spreads among the grains, where it undergoes new metamorphoses. A cellular tissue is now produced, and the fluid deposited between its cells begins to flow with some regularity. The process that gave rise to the primitive tissue continues, and reciprocal actions multiply in proportion to the emergence of more complex tissues. Finally, new vessels, muscular fibres, nerves, etc., are formed.(291)

592. In the four kinds of known generation (viviparous, oviparous, gemmiparous and fissiparous), the particles of liquid giving life to a new individual detach themselves from the body. But because this very significant fact is so normal, we do not sufficiently reflect on it, although it alone, in my opinion, seems to prove that life is joined to the fluids. Our attention is stimulated more by another fact, namely, that vestiges of life are observable in particles which separate from bodies by accident rather than in accordance with the laws of generation as we know it.

After Buffon,(292) who supposed the existence of organised molecules, many others tried to solve this problem.

 

In Italy, Professor Botto made special observations of the movements of animal and vegetable globules suspended in various liquids.(293) These movements could not, it seems, be explained solely by mechanical, physical, chemical and other laws:

Organised globules move extremely rapidly, sometimes seeming to search for each other, sometimes to avoid each other. Occasionally, two globules that have established mutual contact suddenly separate. At other times two joined globules never separate, but undergo a metamorphosis by which they constitute a single body, a single substance that has clearly less mobility than the globules that compose it. This substance now becomes a centre to which various other globules move and, on arrival, almost immediately disappear. The metamorphoses they undergo not only increase the volume of the substance but change its shape and nature.(294)

593. We must not conclude from these observations that some action between the globules takes place at a distance. As I have said, I find no proof making me admit attraction between distant bodies; in fact, the contradiction I find in the concept induces me to deny it. The globules in question could have an intestine movement moving them from one place to another. Swimming in a fluid whose particles, it seems to me, are in contact with each other and endowed with feeling, they could quite easily extend their action to other globules swimming in the same fluid. This would be possible through the action of the feeling, which in the fluid itself would be continuous, although it could increase to such an extent in individual globules that they would become centres of greater action.

594. In any case, we must reflect that different relationships are possible between the all-pervading feeling and other partial feelings. These relationships cease only when the continuity of the sensitive molecules ceases. Whenever these sensitive molecules, either in groups adhering to a centre of feeling or individually, separate from the animal body, they constitute other separate, individual feelings. But before they divide totally, their feeling can be united in varying proximity to the all-pervading feeling and governed by it, or at least influenced and maintained in a certain activity by it.

595. An animal's all-pervading feeling can contribute in many ways to the preservation of other individual feelings. All these ways can be reduced to two: a subjective way, which directly stimulates and activates the feelings until they acquire the intensity necessary for being individuated, and an extrasubjective way, which supplies the centres with food or applies extrasubjective stimuli suitable for maintaining stimulation.

596. In the first, subjective way, an animal's all-pervading feeling directly stimulates feeling in one of its parts with such force as to individualise it. This is what happens in the generative act, at least of the most perfect animals endowed with sex. In my opinion, the feeling present in the particles, which become a new individual, receives from the generative act that precise degree of enrichment necessary for their individuation. The individuation is of course aided by the separation of the seminal substance from the individuals to which it pertained, although it does not entirely detach itself from the female individual, to whom it adheres less than before.

597. The second, extrasubjective way offers many examples, above all in the foetus, which receives not only food but red blood from the mother. I do not know whether the mother extends her own fundamental feeling to that of the foetus or stimulates it directly, but if she did, it would help to explain maternal love. In any case, the foetus is supplied with red blood, impelled forward by the maternal feeling through the umbilical vein. This feeling maintains the interuterine life of the foetus by supplying the incessant, principal stimulus that produces the life of the foetus.

598. Many animals in fact live in other animals. Their life is so bound to the animal containing them that they die with it. They are never found in corpses and die when taken from the body in which they live, although they contract for a time in warm water. We do not yet have sufficient data to determine how their life depends on the life of the larger animal, but the all-pervading feeling could directly communicate its own stimulation by extending its continuum into them. If this is not the case, the all-pervading feeling must, by means of its activity and the actions it produces in the whole body, at least supply these tiny living things with food and, very probably, with the extrasubjective stimuli which keep their feeling restricted to the level of intension necessary for it to be constituted an individual.(295)

599. Indeed, observation reveals that although some of these animals live only in healthy animals, and others are found only in diseased animals, the law governing their production and conservation is the same. The all-pervading feeling, when healthy, is active and produces movements in bodies different from those produced when it is ill. Hence, it must aid the development of different centres and produce different organisations within the sphere of the total organisation.

600. Among animals inhabiting healthy living bodies, sperm hold first place:

 

When semen begins to corrupt, infusoria (which differ greatly from sperm) often develop, as in other fluids. Again, healthy semen gives rise to more numerous and mobile sperm, and to greater physiological activity of the organs that secrete the semen (these conditions are the opposite of those required for the spontaneous development of entozoic infusoria). As soon as the semen shows signs of putrefaction, the sperm disappear and immediately infusoria begin to appear. Animal parasites develop in young individuals that are weak, malnourished, of poor constitution, exposed to the inclemency of the seasons, etc., but sperm appear only when the body is almost fully developed; their ease of reproduction increases in proportion to the robustness and nutrition of the individual in which they are seen. They diminish in quantity, however, and even cease to exist, through the action of causes which weaken health and thus favour the development of parasites.(296)

Sperm are not only proper to the healthy body, they also seem necessary to it, because they seem necessary for generation. Berruti continues:

 

Can we justifiably consider the presence of sperm in semen as an accidental phenomenon, when we see that they never exist in the semen of infertile animals, and that their presence in it is a sure criterion of its capability to fertilise? The experiments of Prévost, Dumas and Lallemand(297) clearly prove that when the semen is filtered from its sperm, it becomes totally incapable of fertilising. On the other hand, the smallest portion of the substance remaining on the filter, principally made up of sperm, is sufficient to fertilise many eggs.(298)

It seems therefore that these tiny animals are as essential to the larger animal that harbours them as the generative faculty is.

601. Animals that seem to develop in bodies because of ill health, or that seem to produce ill health, are of many kinds: entozoa, mange-worms, lice, etc.:

 

Every animal species has its particular entozoa which cannot live in a different species. They perish as soon as they leave the body where they originated. — Every internal organ of a body can breed only a particular kind of entozoa. Among these are hydatids or vesicular worms which have been divided into five major classes, each of which has been further subdivided. They all preserve their life through the influence of the life of the larger animal in which they live. Their division and separation takes place by means of the parenchyma of the organ in which they develop and by means of the membranes and vesicles which contain them. The vesicles' walls seem to have so great an influence in limiting the internal stimulation proper to these tiny animals that the stimulation cannot be extended or communicated to the larger animal which harbours, feeds and stimulates them,(299) and perhaps applies some of its own stimulation. This limitation must contribute to the individuation of these tiny fundamental feelings. The vesicle itself that forms each hydatid must contribute to the limitation. Furthermore, a more or s less consistent, insensitive tegument which encloses all entozoa certainly seems to limit their organisation and their fundamental feeling to quite a small space, for which the walls of the tegument form a kind of dividing line.

In the case of the mange-worm,

 

the researches of Cassel, Raspail and Ranucci seem to prove that the worm almost constantly accompanies mange and in most cases is found not in the mange pustule itself but at some distance from it. It quickly moves away, forging a passage under the epidermis, to nest at some distance from the pustule. — Another species of this worm was discovered by Roland, Martinet and Murny in certain tumours on lepers. Dr. Simon of Berlin also recently discovered and described a third species of worm lodged in human hair follicles.(300)

Arguments to prove the spontaneous generation of lice in healthy children and in those suffering from phthiriasis were put forward by Fournier,(301) Sichel,(302) Burdach(303) and others:

 

Every animal species is subject to a particular variety of lice. Often, an individual of a determined species of living animal, quite separate from all the other individuals of its species, is seen to be pestered by lice proper to its species. Thus, after Patrin had hatched partridge's eggs under a hen, the lice on the partridges were those proper to partridges, without a single louse proper to hens.

602. All these living creatures seem to be generated from the larger host animal in both healthy and diseased states. Spontaneous generation is clearly much more evident at the break-up of the organisation of dead animals and of plants. When such substances are infused into a liquid, very many forms of spontaneous generation can be observed:

 

Infusoria of various species are obtained, depending on the variety of the infused substances and the different conditions of the water and air, which play a part in the effect of the infusion. Thus, the infusion of a vegetal or animal substance lacking nitrogen will produce plant infusoria rather than animals. On the other hand, the infusion of an animal or vegetal substance rich in nitrogen but with little carbon will produce animal rather than plant infusoria. The infusion of different animal substances produce different infusoria, as Gruithuisen demonstrated. He observed that infusoria produced by musk differ from those produced by pus.(304) The change in state of an organic substance is sufficient to produce infusoria of a different species. Thus Spallanzani saw that the infusoria produced by boiled clover seed differed from those obtained from unboiled seed.

To explain all these facts we must suppose, it seems, that feeling is present in every element of matter, and that the composition of these little feelings together with the harmonious unity of their stimulation and accumulation — a composition and unity produced by the activity of feeling itself and by the laws governing composition and unity — produce these kinds of vital organisms and animals.

Notes

(286) Dictionnaire des Sciences médicales, Art. Humeurs [Paris, 1818].

(287) AMS, 247-257.

(288) Ibid.

(289) Bufalini, Fondamenti di Patologia analitica, Milan, 1833, p. 268.

(290) Sulla generazione spontanea e sulla natura dei Zoospermi. Lettera del Prof. Secondo Berruti al Prof. Medici [1st Dec. 1842].

(291) Ibid.

(292) Cocchi had already observed globules of blood and called them 'very lively, swimming' globules, after Malpighi had discovered them.

(293) Observations microscopiques sur les mouvements des globules végétaux suspendus dans un menstrue, J. D. Botto, professor of physics, Royal University of Turin, Memorie della R. Accademia delle Scienze di Torino, Serie 2, t. 2, p. 437.

(294) Berruti, Lettera quoted above.

(295) If an all-pervading feeling exists whose term is a given stimulated continuum, and if in this continuum another tiny composed entity exists with organs whose internal movements are suitable for ceaselessly stimulating feeling but not for propagating the stimulation to the seat of the all-pervading feeling, then this fact alone makes the little entity a tiny individuated animal, as I have said.

(296) Prof. Berruti, who describes the matter better than I could, denies that sperm are animals; he attributes to them only the quality of organic molecules. But I think this is simply a question of words. There is spontaneous movement in sperm, which presupposes feeling, an individual feeling, and therefore an organisation. These, I think, are characteristics of the animal properly speaking, and must be distinguished from divided, animate, but not yet organated elements.

(297) Lallemand's important articles on sperm can be read in the Annales des Sciences naturelles, t. 15, pp. 30, 257, 262.

(298) I think Roland's opinion most probable. He says that the nervous system is given by the father, the cellulo-vascular system by the mother. This opinion is very close to that of Galen, who holds that the male semen turns into brain whose formation, he supposed, preceded that of the heart. Prévost and Dumas proposed the further hypothesis that only the sperm are used in fertilisation and converted into the nervous system. They note that the linear form of sperm has a bulbous extremity which would become the brain, and a tail which would change into the spinal cord. This hypothesis is opposed by the objection that while a system divided from others cannot remain alive, sperm continue to live. The objection however, does not seem to carry much weight.

The essence of the animal is perhaps totally in the nervous system, while other parts are extrasubjective supports and stimuli, or at least parts where only the feeling of continuity is diffused, not the feeling of stimulation (at least in its normal state), which is the characteristic of the animal. The nervous system cannot live by itself because it needs nutrition and stimuli. Sperm, however, receive stimuli and nutrition from the animal in which they live or into which they pass during fertilisation. Even if they show themselves to be alive when taken out of their natural habitat, it is only for a short time, and probably because they receive some nutrition or stimulus from the fluid into which they are put for observation. If, as Lallemand believes, sperm are originally all globular in form and later acquire a tail, this simply demonstrates that they also have a certain growth. We must note that, according to Czermak, there are as many species of sperm as of animals endowed with the prolific fluid.

(299) When the species of hydatids called egg acephalocysts, bud and grain acephalocysts, form in a part of the body abundantly supplied with a network of cells, they are seen to be surrounded by a more or less thick layer of cells from which they receive many blood vessels. This layer must supply nutrition, stimulation and perhaps participation in the stimulation enjoyed by the fundamental feeling of the host animal.

(300) Gazzette des Hôpit., 29th Nov. 1842. Observations sur les acares vivants dans les follicules pilleux de l'homme, Dr. Gustave Simon (of Berlin).

(301) Dictionnaire des sc. med., art. Casrares.

(302) Historiae phtirialis verae fragmentum.

(303) Traité de physiologie, t. 1, p. 39.

(304) Gruithuisen (Organozoonomie, Munich, 1811, p. 164) says that he obtained a corresponding variety of infusoria by changing his experiments in a great number of ways.'

Chapter 19.

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