ANATOMY, 



DESOEIPTIVE AND SURGICAL. 



INTRODUCTION. 



GENERAL ANATOMY. 



THE fluids of the body, which are intended for its nutrition, are the lymph, 

 the chyle, and the blood. There are other fluids also which partially subserve 

 the same purpose, as the saliva, the gastric juice, the bile, the intestinal secre- 

 tion; and others which are purely excrementitious, as the urine. All these 

 fluids form a part of the bulk of the body under ordinary circumstances. But 

 there is no need to describe the rest in this place, since they are the secretions 

 of special organs, and are described, as far as is judged necessary for the 

 purposes of this work, in subsequent pages. We shall here speak first of the 

 blood, and next of the lymph and chyle. 



THE BLOOD. 



The Blood is a fluid holding a large number of minute cells or corpuscles 

 in suspension. Its general physical characters are so well known that we 

 need merely say that it is of a dark red or purple color in the veins, and of a 

 bright red or scarlet in the arteries; that it is viscid, drying rapidly, and with 

 a clammy feeling; salt to the taste, slightly alkaline, and with a specific 

 gravity of about 1055. 



General Composition of the Blood. On standing, blood, under ordinary circum- 

 stances, soon separates into two parts a fluid called the " serum" and a clot or 

 " coagulum" The latter is not merely the cells or blood-corpuscles spoken of 

 above as held in suspension, and which have subsided out of the fluid, but 

 consists besides of fibrin which has been held in solution in the fluid blood, 

 and which in its solidification has inclosed and implicated the blood-corpuscles 

 as they subside. 



The blood is thus seen to consist naturally of two parts, the plasma, or liquor 

 sanguinis, a fluid rich in fibrin, and the blood-cells, or Hood-corpuscles; and when 

 drawn from the body, of two parts composed differently to the above viz., the 

 clot, which comprises the blood-corpuscles and the fibrin of the plasma; and 

 the serum, which consists of the remainder of the plasma. 



The Blood- corpuscles, Blood-disks, or Blood- globules, as they are more commonly 

 called, are of two kinds, the red and the white. The red globules are far the 

 more numerous, and are those which are always intended when the expression 

 blood-disks or blood-globules is used without any other qualification. They 

 are said to be in man about three or four hundred times as numerous as the 

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