366 
DR. PHILIP ON THE POWERS OF LIFE. 
The power which operates here, has been termed the sympathy of parts, the 
effects of which I have considered at length in a treatise on the more obscure diseases 
of the brain, being the Gulstonian Lectures delivered at the College of Physicians in 
1835. I am now, after referring to its more prominent effects, to consider the 
nature of this function, and the powers on which it immediately depends. 
AS it appears from the experiments above referred to that the organs of the sen- 
sorial and nervous powers, the leading principles of the two great systems the func- 
tions of which comprehend all the functions of life, although both belonging to the 
brain and spinal marrow, are distinct sets of organs ; the one set being confined to 
a comparatively small portion of these organs, the other distributed through the whole 
of them, from the uppermost surfaces of the brain and cerebellum to the lowest por- 
tion of the spinal marrow ; and as numberless observations evince that the imme- 
diate cause of sympathy exists in the central organs alone *, it follows that these 
systems must have different centres of sympathy, that if the different parts of each 
system sympathize, it cannot be through the same centre-f\ Now it appears from the 
phenomena of disease, compared with the results of the experiments just referred 
to, that each of the centres of these systems is often influenced with so little 
disturbance to the other, that disease of either system, especially when of a chronic 
nature, often spreads to distant parts of the system in question, without much affect- 
ing the other ; a favourable result in the sensitive system, because it is only in pro- 
portion as the organs of the vital system are implicated that life is endangered ; but 
in the vital system the most fruitful of all causes of obscurity, and that in diseases of 
the most formidable nature, to which many have fallen, and still fall a sacrifice ; for 
so ill supplied are many of the vital organs with nerves of sensation, that in them dis- 
eases of sympathy often make a fatal progress without the state of the part originally 
affected having attracted attention, and without its restoration, that of the part secon- 
darily, but more prominently, affected is impossible^. Thus also it is, — that is, in 
consequence of the one system often suffering with little disturbance to the other, — 
that extreme suffering not unfrequently continues for years without materially im- 
pairing the functions of life, the organs of suffering belonging to the sensitive system ; 
while in other instances immediate danger presents itself with so little previous suf- 
fering, that even the medical attendant is unprepared for it. 
* My Gulstonian Lectures. 
+ Ibid. 
X The internal water in the head of children, for example, has, till within the last thirty years, been almost 
uniformly fatal, having been treated as an original affection of the brain. Dissection having now proved it to 
be a secondary affection depending on the state of the liver, there are few serious diseases in which the treat- 
ment is more uniformly successful, if it has not been allowed to arrive at its last stage. The original affection, 
which does not betray itself by any prominent symptom, being removed, its consequences yield to the means, 
which are powerless while it continues to operate. Other affections of the head, certain forms of pulmonary 
consumption, and many other diseases might be adduced as illustrating the same principles. 
