163 
Report on ‘‘ The Motions and Sounds of the Heart.” By the 
London Committee of the British Association, for 1839-40. 
Tue following Report consists of two distinct portions; the 
former consisting of experiments performed at King’s College, 
in 1839, by the London Committee for 1838-9; and the latter 
detailing the experiments of the Committee for 1839-40, per- 
formed at the Marylebone Infirmary in the present year. The 
former series, performed in conjunction by Prof. ‘Todd, Dr. 
C. J. B. Williams and the Reporter, with occasional assist- 
ance from Dr. Roget, were commenced but not completed, 
owing to the difficulty of procuring subjects and other circum- 
stances beyond the control of the Committee. No report of 
those experiments was consequently presented at the Bir- 
mingham meeting, or has yet been published ; and an account 
of them is therefore now prefixed to the report of the proceed- 
ings of the Committee for the current year. 
The experiments of 1838-9 were performed with the view 
to determine the physical and pathological causes of certain 
modifications of the motions and sounds of the heart that are 
presented by disease; a chief object being to ascertain how, 
by mechanical and other irritations and by displacement of the 
heart, murmurs could be produced ; how also by inflammation. 
Whether for example, the pericarditic friction sounds de- 
pend on deficient lubrication of the pericardium, or on vascu- 
lar turgescence, or are dependent solely on the effusion of 
lymph ;—how far also the natural sounds might be impaired by 
interrupting the action of the valves in the living subject, or by 
spontaneous or artificially excited abnormal action in the mus- 
cular parts of the cavities without structural lesion. Another 
inquiry was this—How far do the motions and sounds of the 
heart in the lower animals correspond with those of the hu- 
man subject; whether for example, in birds and other animals 
that differ more or less from man in their cardiac anatomy, 
there be not corresponding differences in the cardiac sounds 
and motions? ‘To these questions the experiments for 1838-9 
supply answers in most cases, which are satisfactory in the 
opinion of the Committee to as great an extent as could be 
calculated on from so limited a number of observations: they 
feel however that the experiments were too few finally to 
decide any point of much difficulty or importance, and that 
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