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The Diseases of the Liver, With and Without Jaundice; With the Special Application of Physiological Chemistry to Their Diagnosis and Treatment
The Diseases of the Liver With and Without Jaundice With the Special Application of Physiological Chemistry to Their Diagnosis and Treatment Author:George Harley General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1883 Original Publisher: Blakiston. Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can sele... more »ct from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER II. THE CHEMISTRY, PHYSICS, AND PHYSIOLOGY OF THE LIVER. From the fact that in every individual case of hepatic disease the liver, at least in some part of the course of the affection, becomes altered iu composition, in specific gravity, in weight, and in size, it is absolutely indispensable for the practitioner to know something about these factors in health, as well as to be acquainted with some of their more salient variations in disease. I shall now consider each of them in brief detail. Chemical Composition Of The Liver. There is no single organ in the human body the chemical composition of whose healthy substance varies so much as that of the liver, and this is readily accounted for when the nature of its functions is properly understood. In order to avoid repetition I shall refer the reader to p. 55, where he will find the hepatic functions, which are four in number, treated of in detail. Meanwhile I shall only remark that the liver, being an organ of the body intimately connected with the development and nutrition of the tissues, plays a more important part in the animal economy in youth than in age; and hence it gradually diminishes in proportional size and weight as age advances. Moreover, as the important part it plays is in the preparation of the food for assimilation, the contents of its hepatic cells vary from hour to hour, not only according to the state of the digestion, but also according to the quality and quantity of the food taken. Thus, for example, after a fatty meal the hepatic cells are loaded with oil-globules; after a farinaceous meal...« less