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Essays on Determination of Blood to the Head
Essays on Determination of Blood to the Head Author:Robert Hull Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ESSAY II, SLEEPINESS Is a symptom, so thinks the subject of it, denoting " determination." But it is by no means diagnostic. Debility often manifests itsel... more »f in unusual sleep: difficult digestion prompts to it, and even requires it. Some imagine that, in ordinary sleep, more blood is sent into the brain, and that this is the reason why apoplexy is witnessed most frequently in the drowsy subject: why, moreover, the period of an apoplectic or paralytic seizure is often the night, the patient asleep. But Richerand, far from considering sleep, as such, a compressor of the brain, through increased afflux of blood, believes that while sleep lasts, the cerebrum collapses; a sign that the flow of blood into it is remarkably less. That the sleep produced by pressure on the brain, as in experiments on a living animal, is a state of disease not more natural than apoplexy. Thus sleep is produced by two opposite proximate causes: healthy sleep by derivation from the brain; morbid, by the pressure of too much blood. And this exposition enforces and illustrates the pathology of Dr. Hall and other writers, in which the very same and formidable, fatal symptoms proceed from inanition and fulness of vessels! This should calm the apprehensions of those who think sleep and "determination" concatenate. Let them once ascertain that their cause of sleep is not morbid, and they will not fear a morbid influence from sleep — sleep, I mean, not carried beyond limited bounds, in a horizontal posture. This seems the true producer of afflux, and should, therefore, be religiously avoided after a full meal, while the chyle rushes torrent-like into the blood-vessels. Thus a person, taking his siesta, prostrate, not sitting—his only safe position—shall feel an unwillingness, almost impotence, to...« less