172 Historical 



it to the expansion of the air contained in the cellular tissue of the 

 organ, as well as to the cold of the surrounding air .... I put on a 

 woolen hood which was at my feet; but the pain vanished only when 

 I reached the ground. 



This marvellous invention thrilled the whole world; the most 

 ardent illusions about the practical utility of balloons were cher- 

 ished. Among the strange ideas produced by these experiments 

 in which man took possession of the air for the first time, one of 

 the most curious is that which, less than a year after the first 

 ascent, inspired a thesis sustained in 1784 before the Faculty of 

 Medicine of Montpellier. Louis Leullier-Duche, its author, 2 had 

 the idea of using balloon ascension as a treatment of diseases. 



"The effect," he said, "will be triple: motion, cold, change of 

 air." 



He insists especially upon this last point: 



The essential part of air is for man the dephlogisticated air 

 (oxygen). Now in what proportion is it united with the phlogistic in 

 the different regions of the atmosphere? Chemists have not deter- 

 mined. But as the phlogistic is lighter, there must be more of it at 

 a very great height .... The neighborhood of the earth is the proper 

 region of the dephlogisticated air. But we cannot doubt that it is 

 polluted there by different emanations of volatile bodies. And so, in 

 that part of the atmosphere which is the region of dephlogisticated 

 air, the latter is purer the further we go from the surface of 

 the earth. Moreover, as it is colder, the dephlogisticated air is accu- 

 mulated and condensed there. 



Leullier-Duche attributes the strongest curative virtues to oxy- 

 gen, and considers that it acts even on generation and death: 



Births at Montpellier coincide with the spring months and deaths 

 with the autumn months; during the spring, the atmosphere is more 

 laden with dephlogisticated air which the growth of plants produces, 

 and during autumn their putrefaction releases a greater quantity of 

 inflammable or phlogistic air (he refers to nitrogen by this double 

 name). 



Leullier-Duche then proposes to use balloons in the treatment 

 of intermittent, pestilential, or nervous fevers, rickets, scurvy, 

 hysteria, chlorosis, melancholy, slow healing sores, etc. 



We have seen that the inventor of the hydrogen balloon, in the 

 first and only ascent which he made, experienced painful sensations 

 when he had risen rapidly to a height of about 3000 meters. It 

 was simply a matter of the expansion of the gases of the middle 

 ear, gases which on account of the speed of the ascent had not 

 had time to escape by the Eustachian tube. More serious symp- 

 toms were soon to be observed. 



