People laugh at that
notion now-a-days; but if anybody will look at the facts he will see
that it is a very probable supposition. There is a great vein (hepatic
vein--Fig. 1) which rises out of the liver, and that vein goes straight
into the 'vena cava' (Fig. 1) which passes to the heart, being there
joined by the other veins of the body. The liver itself is fed by a
very large vein (portal vein--Fig. 1), which comes from the alimentary
canal. The way the ancients looked at this matter was, that the food,
after being received into the alimentary canal, was then taken up by the
branches of this great vein, which are called the 'vena portae', just
as the roots of a plant suck up nourishment from the soil in which it
lives; that then it was carried to the liver, there to be what was
called "concocted," which was their phrase for its conversion into
substances more fitted for nutrition than previously existed in it.
They then supposed that the next thing to be done was to distribute
this fluid through the body; and Galen like his predecessors, imagined
that the "concocted" blood, having entered the great 'vena cava', was
distributed by its ramifications all over the body.
Pages:
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38