Anatomical Observations on the Lungs

...liquefaction; original: "colliquatione"; completing the word from the previous page's catchword indeed, the lungs themselves, in which this whole business is conducted, are almost the first to feel its severity. Therefore, it is no wonder if one must proceed with only those things that are heavily thickening and that restrain movement—such as milk, barley-water original: "ptisana," a medicinal decoction, snails, baths, oils, and similar substances—to suppress the activity of this ferment.

In these patients, therefore, from the new food and the chyle The milky fluid formed in the small intestine during digestion, which Malpighi believed was refined in the lungs. arriving in the lungs, such heat increases that they then sensibly experience fever; and as the thinned blood works its way further in, their cheeks especially redden. Finally, as happens in similar cases, the structure and passages of the lungs are either eroded or opened wider than is right, gaping into the cavity of the chest or into the original: "asperas arterias"; literally "rough arteries," the historical term for the trachea and bronchial tubes windpipes. Thus, sometimes blood, and sometimes only the white part of the blood, thickened by light heat, breaks out through the sputum, or sometimes it collects in the thorax the chest cavity.

Such is the necessity and excellence of this fermentation that in certain women, for whom it is not properly stimulated for some reason, the white and serous part of the blood increases so much—not without affecting the lungs—that the red part almost perishes. Anyone can observe this by inspecting blood from a cut vein, and confirm it by the color, lethargy, and the cachexia A state of physical wasting and ill health of the body. Indeed, at a fixed time by nature's design in healthy women, it swells so much that by opening paths for itself, it fulfills the monthly menstrual purgings. From all this, it is not difficult to recognize the origin of actual heat, since we know from other sources that warm particles, when loosened and stirred into motion, induce a sensation of actual heat in us, which is well-performed by the ferment.

To these uses I could add another equally necessary one: namely, that the lungs were fashioned by nature as a kind of blood-storehouse original: "sanguineum penu", so that they may continually and in turns supply blood to the heart, which, driven by it in a perpetual circuit throughout the whole, imparts both life and motion to all things. However, since this has been touched upon by others, I will only briefly add that in animals that are still alive after the chest has been opened, if the already collapsed lungs are inflated again by inserting a tube, the motion of the heart—which was almost extinguished—is restored as the blood bursts into...