MOTION OF THE HEART AND BLOOD 



In tertian fever, the cause of the sickness first 

 seeking the heart, lingers about the heart and lungs 

 and causes shortness of breath, sighing and languor. 

 This happens because the vital energy is depressed, 

 and because the blood, driven into the lungs, thick- 

 ens and cannot pass through, as I have noted in 

 autopsies on those dying during the beginning of 

 the disease. Then the pulse is rapid, feeble, and 

 somewhat irregular. When the heat increases, the 

 blood thins out, and an open passage is made, then 

 the whole body warms, the pulse becomes strong 

 and full during the febrile state, while the abnormal 

 heat kindled in the heart is scattered from there 

 to the body, through the arteries, along with the 

 morbific matter, which is thus naturally dissolved 

 and overpowered.^ 



This may also explain why some medical agents 

 applied to the skin have almost as much effect as if 

 taken by mouth. Colocynth and aloes applied 

 externally move the bowels, cantharides excites 



may be filtered out before the lymph passes into the veins. Plarvey's 

 reasoning here gave a new turn to the old humoral pathology, again 

 unfortunately neglected by physicians until long after. 



^ It is interesting, in view of our present conceptions of immune 

 reactions to infectious processes, that Harvey should have implied 

 that fever is a beneficial response in the infected individual. The 

 success of Peruvian or Jesuits' bark, — called cinchona from the 

 Spanish Countess Chinchona, one of the first Europeans to benefit 

 from it (1638), — in relieving malarial fevers, obscured the signi- 

 ficance of Harvey's implication until recently. The general feeling 

 developed that the fever should be reduced at any cost. Hence the 

 extraordinary interest with the rise of synthetic organic chemistry 

 in the "antipyretics." 



[109] 



