HEART AND BLOOD. 5!) 



ternaturally distended or gorged, not so suddenly and violently 

 overwhelmed with the charge of blood forced in upon them, 

 that the flesh is lacerated and the vessels ruptured. Nothing 

 of the kind as an effect of heat, or pain, or the vacuum force, 

 is either credible or demonstrable. 



Besides, the' ligature is competent to occasion the afflux in 

 question without either pain, or heat, or vis vacui. Were pain 

 in any way the cause, how should it happen that, with the arm 

 bound above the elbow, the hand and fingers should swell below 

 the bandage, and their veins become distended ? The pressure 

 of the bandage certainly prevents the blood from getting there by 

 the veins. And then, wherefore is there neither swelling nor 

 repletion of the veins, nor any sign or symptom of attraction or 

 afflux, above the ligature ? But this is the obvious cause of the 

 preternatural attraction and swelling below the bandage, and 

 in the hand and fingers, that the blood is entering abundantly, 

 and with force, but cannot pass out again. 



Now is not this the cause of all tumefaction, as indeed 

 Avicenna has it, and of all oppressive redundancy in parts, that 

 the access to them is open, but the egress from them is closed ? 

 Whence it comes that they are gorged and tumefied. And may 

 not the same thing happen in local inflammations, where, so 

 long as the swelling is on the increase, and has not reached its 

 extreme term, a full pulse is felt in the part, especially when 

 the disease is of the more acute kind, and the swelling usually 

 takes place most rapidly. But these are matters for after dis- 

 cussion. Or does this, which occurred in my own case, happen 

 from the same cause. Thrown from a carriage upon one occa- 

 sion, I struck my forehead a blow upon the place where a twig 

 of the artery advances from the temple, and immediately, within 

 the time in which twenty beats could have been made, I felt a 

 tumour the size of an egg developed, without either heat or any 

 great pain : the near vicinity of the artery had caused the blood 

 to be effused into the bruised part with unusual force and 

 quickness. 



And now, too, we understand wherefore in phlebotomy we 

 apply our fillet above the part that is punctured, not below it; 

 did the flow come from above, not from below, the bandage in 

 this case would not only be of no service, but would prove a po- 

 sitive hinderance ; it would have to be applied below the orifice, 



