A Text Book of Physiology V.1, 1888
by Michael Foster (9780217670760)

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: INTRODUCTION. 1. Dissection, aided by microscopical examination, teaches us that the body of man is made up of certain kinds of material, so differing from each other in optical and other physical characters and so built up together as to give the body certain structural features. Chemical examination further teaches us that these kinds of material are composed of various chemical substances, a large number of which have this characteristic that they possess a considerable amount of potential energy capable of being set free, rendered actual, by oxidation or some other chemical change. Thus the body as a whole may, from a chemical point of view, be considered as a mass of various chemical substances, representing altogether a considerable capital of potential energy. 2. This body may exist either as a living body or (for a certain time at least) as a dead body, and the living body may at any time become a dead body. At what is generally called the moment of death (but artificially so, for as we shall see the processes of death are numerous and gradual) the dead body so far as structure and chemical composition are concerned is exceedingly like the living body; indeed the differences between the two are such as can be determined only by very careful examination, and are still to a large extent estimated by drawing inferences rather than actually observed. At any rate the dead body at the moment of death resembles the living body in so far as it represents a capital of potential energy. From that moment onwards however the capital is expended; by processes which are largely those of oxidation, the energy is gradually dissipated, leaving the body chiefly in the form of heat. While these chemical processes are going on the structural features disappear, and the body, with ...

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